Goosebumps

 

“Praise the LORD. How good it is to sing praises to our God,

how pleasant and fitting to praise him!” Psalm 147:1

I remember a certain species of goosebumps, my first. I was twelve years old maybe, part of a choir festival a half century ago in a small town in Wisconsin, dozens of kids drawn from a dozen Christian schools. The music was Bach—“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” For almost fifty years I’ve not been able to hear that piece without remembering that day. My entire self—heart, soul, mind, and strength—reacted to the beauty.

Those goosebumps arrived in an afternoon rehearsal before the big concert that night. I remember what that gym looked like, which step I occupied on the bleachers, and some of the kids who stood around me; and I remember being embarrassed because this unmanly tearful impulse, this odd soul tremor was a threat that required whatever testosterone I had to stifle. Something weird in me made tears arise.

The music was gorgeous. I didn't know Bach from Beethoven, but I knew what we were singing was glorious. But my girlfriend was there, and I haven’t forgotten that either. She stood a row or two beneath me in the choir, and her being there was part of this odd emotional seizure. The music alone would not have raised such a visceral reaction. My seeing her, a row or two beneath me was part of the moment too.

And faith played a role too—we were singing about Jesus, of course, and we were all kids from Christian schools; and then there was the beautiful music—we couldn’t do much better than Bach; and my girlfriend—well, I suppose most of us experience love long before we can define it. Being part of something so much bigger than myself had to play a role too—all these kids were making a beautiful, joyful noise.

Psalm 147 says, first thing out of the box, how pleasant it is praise him—how pleasant. It’s an amazingly human assertion: "Sheesh, praising God feels good." The first declaration of this psalm has nothing to do with duty (“we should praise him”) or his wanting our praise. Instead, the psalm starts with all of us from the Me Generation: hey, praising God just plain feels good. And, oh yeah, it’s fitting too.

I wonder whether my skin turned inside out and my tears ducts threatened because, maybe for the first time, my “self” disappeared. I got lost in the music, lost in affection, lost in the joyful affirmation of group love that is choral music, lost in all those things, lost in plain beauty, just flat-out lost, lost in praise.

Just about every great religion maintains that self-lessness is a good, good thing. Love is selfless. Heroism is selfless. Vivid spiritual experience is always selfless. When Mariane Pearl heard of her husband Danny’s brutal execution at the hands of terrorists some years ago, she said she was able to handle it because she’d been chanting. She’s Hindu. “The real benefit of having practiced and chanted was that at that moment was that I was so clear on what was going on. This is a time when I didn’t think about myself at all,” she says. And that was a gift.

Sometimes it’s just good to lose yourself. It’s good to praise, to give yourself to God. It’s good to love, to give yourself away. Praise—whether it’s evoked by a Bach chorale or bright new dawn—gives us a chance to empty ourselves.

And that’s good, and it’s pleasant,
and it’s fitting before the King—our King, the joy of man’s desiring.

"By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed"

No one mentioned it, but the truth is that the meeting was definitely historic. As few as a couple of decades ago, a get-together between churches of the two denominations would have been almost unthinkable.

 

I can't complain about my parents. They were pious but thoughtful, capable of long and involved discussions about politics or theology, conversations they enjoyed and I enjoyed hearing when I was old enough to understand the fundamental issues being discussed. The stock images of dour, nay-saying Dutch Calvinists was nowhere close to applicable. My parents loved the Lord, they'd say, and practiced a piety that was as palpable at home as prayer itself.

But when my sister fell in love with a boy from the Reformed Church (RCA), they weren't happy, largely because, traditionally at least, members of the RCA not only didn't support but actually opposed Christian education, which is to say the Christian school I attended and they supported (my father was board president, my mother a frequent substitute teacher), the Oostburg Christian School just a block--maybe less--from 714 Superior, where I grew up. 

When my sister determined she would marry the RCA boy, things were said that were never totally forgotten. I believe they learned to love him, but in some ways the damage was done, as it was in many homes of the Dutch Reformed people in whose close circles I grew up, people who considered what my sister entered into something of a "mixed marriage."

The meeting, just one night ago, as far as I know, was locally the first of its kind: members of two denominations meeting in one room to discuss their mutual concerns in light of theological questions surrounding gay marriage. Today, it seems, both groups can consolidate their missions by a perverse looming enemy, what conservatives used to call "the gay agenda." What's brought the RCA and CRC together after 164 years (the CRC officially left in 1857) was gay marriage; both denominations have suffered bitter dissension about how to deal with homosexuality.

A mutual struggle brought them together--not because of gay marriage, the participants maintained, but because of radically different views of scripture. Those who would close the door on the LGBTQ issue claim those who wouldn't quite simply do not read the Bible right. The division is a matter of orthodoxy, specifically whose orthodoxy is the verifiable orthodoxy.

Late in the meeting, a well-meaning man stood to say he was 76 years old, and he just wanted to say that his grandfather feared the Lord and read the Bible as if it were the Word of God. It wasn't an unfamiliar comment, nor was it off the track of the conversations that went on. "Give me that old-time religion," he might have said, a comforting idea that resonated with lots of people who'd gathered. 

But it's also silly. I'm sorry. No one in or around Sioux Center, Iowa, practices a way of life the man's grandfather did in the Siouxland of the 1930s and 40s, when some congregations still used the Dutch language and would (and did) fight to save it. 

We no longer live in his grandpa and grandma's era. If you would like to know the difference, read the imaginative writers of the era or visit a local museum. Still, that comment energizes many who want to walk away from those with whom they disagree and animated the discussion even before he said what he did.

I know exactly where to look in the book I wrote about the history of the Christian Reformed Church to find a list of the reasons why the CRC broke away from the RCA in 1857. In less than a minute, I could find a handy listing of those reasons, but don't ask me to recite them. I'm guessing very, very few of those who gathered in that church sanctuary, a word we once used, could list any one of the five reasons I listed and discussed in that book. Any. Of. The. Reasons.

I'd love to go back to Alaska and know more about the life and work of the Rev. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary who traveled unceasingly throughout the west, establishing churches, doing wonderful work among a people dispossessed by waves of white people who wanted their land. There's a museum there, all about his work. 

If you'd like to read exciting stories about Native America, pick up a biography of Father DeSmit, a legendary Jesuit "black robe," who left a legacy you can see in innumerable stained glass tributes throughout the west. I share DNA with the Rev. Andrew VanderWagen, a CRC pastor, who learned to love the Zuni people in New Mexico, gave his life to them, and is buried there among them, as is his wife and children.

But I can also point you at books written by Native people who describe Christian missionaries whose palpable enmity was sourced in their differing denominational backgrounds, men whose hate and spite Indigenous people saw as hopelessly confusing and was, as they describe it, a blot on their Christian witness.

I can't help but wonder at the righteousness of yet another split, another faction, another denomination. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity says there are already 200 denominations in these United States and 45,000 in the world. 

It seems some among us believe there should be yet another, this one home of the truly orthodox.

Required Reading

It's hard to believe it's gone, but I'll bet it is. For generations, American high school students read Stephen Crane' Red Badge of Courage, a true Civil War novel that wasn't "true" in any way. One of the onerous tasks of teaching the novel was having to admit, at one time or another, that Stephen Crane was a kid when he wrote it (24 years old) and that, if you do the math, there's no way he ever fought in the American Civil War. In fact, he never spent an hour in battle.

He made up the whole story. He may well have read accounts of a battle, but Stephen Crane imagined himself carrying the flag of the United States of America into battle. Can't help feeling a little cheated about that.

But, like it or not, The Red Badge of Courage was, for decades (it was published in 1895), the Civil War novel, and, truth be told, I'm willing to bet that it was read that way, as a kind of historical record, more than it was for its epoch-making "worldview," a vision of life that required some smarts both to teach and to understand. 

What it offered, lots of English teachers celebrated (as did I), was something called "literary naturalism," baggage that was heavier than simply literary. It was a "world view," a way of looking at reality, its own pair of spectacles. The Red Badge of Courage featured a kid (Crane was just 24 when he wrote it) who ran from the battlefield and suffers for it, although he suffers far more internally than he does from some officer's reprimand or military imprisonment. 

The great story is the not the story of the war, but the story of the disillusion he suffers, not because of war but because he has, seemingly, failed.  In RBC, Crane takes a kind of morbid delight in the kid's psychic misery and asks us all to do the same. All of which means that America's greatest Civil War novel isn't about the Civil War at all--it's about how our minds and hearts function. It's about us--Crane's view of us.

But, who cares? RBC is long-gone from American high school classrooms, I'm sure, just as The Merchant of Venice is long gone from required reading for high school sophomores, and I'll bet even in Minnesota kids don't read Sinclair Lewis. Today, it's hard to believe that what we used to call "the canon" is pretty much non-existent. 

In college American lit classes, any study of Stephen Crane would likely expand to include "The Open Boat," a wild tale about a storm at sea, and, if a student really wanted to wade into literary naturalism, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a little novel that feels like more of a character-study than a finished imaginative work. Maggie never works its way in your heart. You read it and weep. Maggie's sad fortunes bring her down to the shady side of town, and won't allow her escape. 

Such is life, Crane says.

When I was in college and beginning to imagine a life as a high school English teacher, Stephen Crane was something of hero. After all, as an author he was just a kid himself--and he loved baseball. What's not to like?

Read a review of a new biography of Stephen Crane this morning, a bio that the reviewer says includes more pages than the whole collected works of the man whose work he's studying.

For years I taught Early American Literature, Am lit up to the Civil War, so Stephen Crane was not part of the curriculum for which I was responsible. It's been years since I read Maggie, even RBC. Truth be told, I hadn't thought much about Stephen Crane himself, an old hero, oddly enough, until this morning when I read the review. 

It's odd to remember how much I admired him, once upon a time long ago, but I didn't have to refresh my memory. It's all there yet in my head, even though his peculiar world view is not in my heart.

It's like wading through old photographs and suddenly coming upon one that instantly flashes memories you don't remember you had. A lifetime ago, Stephen Crane, even his life, offered me a path through life.  

Even though I was really never a disciple, I'm glad that sometime, years ago, I met him through his work and came away blessed--yes, blessed. 

Today, I wish the same for my grandchildren. Red Badge of Courage isn't required reading, but I want them to have the kind of education that dutifully and artfully explores what's really in the human mind and soul. 

I want their required reading to be just as important.

Dirty Stories

No, it's not an easy read. Like the Book of Job, the novel is dark and often dreary and depressing. But then, so is its world, the world of institutional slavery. When Toni Morrison wrote Beloved, she deliberately and defiantly chose to take on what many historians of culture call America's "original sin." Beloved is the story of a woman who did the unthinkable because the unthinkable was worse than the unimaginable.

Morrison based her story on a horrific event recorded in a religious magazine in 1856, the account of a woman so determined that her children would not return to slavery that she decided to kill them rather than have them submit treachery she herself had experienced. It's the story of Sethe, the mom who murdered a daughter when the Fugitive Slave Law was just outside her door ready to drag all of them back to chains. Denver, a second daughter, escaped death only because Sethe had time to kill only one of her children. 

Morrison's story is complex and moves in strange directions. The Civil War is over now, but the child Sethe murdered haunts their house and their lives, and most people in the community know it and avoid them. What happens isn't pleasant, but then, to say the least, neither was slavery. When, eventually, the ghost, Beloved, disappears, Sethe is heartbroken, because ghost or not, Beloved was her deceased child after all.

At the end, Denver, Sethe's living daughter, sits with her mother and her mother's grief and insists, in a moment I've always felt triumphant, that Beloved wasn't her mother's "best thing," as her mother's tears insist, but that she herself is her "best thing."

Sophie's Choice, a Holocaust novel by William Styron, left a permanent record in my soul. It's a difficult novel I'd love to take a shot at editing myself. It's the work of a mind I don't always understand, but nothing I've ever read about the Holocaust has left the mark Sophie's Choice has in a horrific moment when a woman stands on the platform, having just arrived at Auschwitz, and is told by Mengele that one of her two children will go to the gas chamber. It is her job to determine which of her children will live and which will die. 

No moment in anything I've ever read detailed as excruciatingly the horror of death camp suffering than the moment Styron created right there on the platform. 

For me at least, Morrison's Beloved, has a place in my soul as permanent as Styron's Sophie's Choice. If someone wanted to understand the horrific legacy of the institutional slavery, I'd recommend Toni Morrison's Beloved. And I am not the only reader so taken. In 1988, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

So this weekend the Republican candidate for the office of governor in Virginia released an ad that featured a brave woman--that's her up top--who took on the evil liberals of her son's high school English department when she picked up Beloved and found, well, bad stuff. She complained to the school's board, told them her son was being forced to read really bad things. 

I'm a liberal. I'll confess. I hope the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe wins the gubernatorial race in Virginia; but the issue that new ad prompts is bigger than an election because it has to do with how we understand and value our own past.

That woman, the Republican candidate suggests, is a hero for policing her son's assignments and clearing him from having to read Beloved for an advance placement class during his senior year in high school. 

I can't help but think she's wrong. She doesn't want her 18-year-old son, who's taking an advance placement--which is to say "college" class--reading the filth millions of her countrymen and women say is one of America's all-time greatest novels, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Twenty years ago maybe, Christianity Today asked me to participate in a story they were doing on writers' favorite works. I've never been fond of answering questions like that because they force judgments I can't make. But I agreed to participate. I don't remember the whole list, but I do remember telling CT that my all-time favorite novel was Toni Morrison's Beloved.

One of us wrong. Sorry, lady, but in my mind and heart and soul, it's you.

Some few more thoughts about the B of J

I'm guessing it was forty years ago now that Chaim Potok, a Jewish novelist who'd acquired quite a reputation among American evangelicals (we were a different bunch back then), paid a visit to Dordt College. I know, that statement sounds as fictional as Book of Job, but he did. He was here. I know. I was there.

At the home of the President of the college, the English department and our guest, Mr. Potok, were invited for dinner one evening. Whether it was over dinner or after is immaterial. I have no idea how it was we were chatting about scripture, nor do I remember anything of what was said other than one darlingly devilish remark he made about the Book of Job. 

He wore a wry smile all the way through the line. "You can't help but wonder," he said, "whether the writer created the ending just so he could get his story into the canon." 

We all giggled. I still do. It was a level of spotten that would have been impossible to get away with as a Dordt prof, but Mr. Potok meant it in good fun, even if it landed well outside of the boundaries of orthodoxy. But, Potok was Jewish, we reasoned, and Jewish folks have a whole different view of scripture. 

What he meant, jokingly, was that whoever wrote the fiction that is the Book of Job understood very well that all that bickering and belly-aching required an ending that would please the editor--the Almighty, and that what's there--Job gets chewed out for the preposterous notion that he can understand God--is something that simply had to be. What the statement suggests is that the ending is tacked on in order to get some wholesome sales. That assessment was shocking, like the ending itself, which is far more scary than nice. Job was minding his own business and doing it with a credible righteousness when God almighty hung him out for Satan to do his dirty thing.

After endless theological bickering, the writer finally brought in the voice of God to say that if you think you can have a personal relationship with the cosmic power that He is, you're sadly, tragically, mistaken. Be still and know--that sort of thing.

I've never forgotten that assessment, I suppose because something about it sounded as accurate as it may have been errant. Scripture was divinely inspired, I'd always been taught, as if God himself were narrating the text. Way back in grade school, I used to think that God turned himself into ink and flowed right into and out of those feather pens the ancients used. To think that some mortal writer was doing the story-telling, fashioning the book to his own ends, was heretical. But cool.

But I liked it and still do, especially after, once again, reading most of the book aloud, in chunks, and listening to a month of Job sermons. I can't help but wonder whether scripture doesn't do a better job of helping us understand ourselves than it does of truly "understanding" God. 

I can swear to his reality, know he loves me, treasure his morning canvases, the sophisticated beauty of his creative work all around. I can believe He sent his son to this earth to fashion a way of living in accordance with all he wants of us and for us, but I'll never understand him. I'll never know it all. 

And if that's true, then, like Job, I'd better just keep my mouth shut--or at least learn when and how to complain. 

All of which makes me more comfortable with the notion that, like the Book of Job, Holy Writ is really a record of what man thought about God. It seems impossible to believe that the lamentable story of Job actually happened. It has to be some writer's concoction. Some anonymous writer created a story to help him (and us, finally) know something important about God. 

There are times in our lives--don't I wish this weren't true?--when we can't help but think we're in Job-level quandaries. When we are and when we do, this strange fiction is a model, not even necessarily the model, maybe not even a good model, just a model. The Bible tells us repeatedly, "Been there, done that."

Butchered the enemy, even their women and children, oxen and mules? Sure. Been there, done that. But a massacre certainly is not the model. Banned women from speaking in church? Sure. Been there, done that. But that's not the model.

At times, it seems the psalms contradict themselves, but those contradictions don't prompt us to dismiss them as scripture, as Holy Writ. They merely offer us means by which to try to do our express human work: to live in His rule. 

The Book of Job is what one writer wanted to say, his view of things. Is it Right (upper case R)? That's a question not worth asking. The book is there. It's in the canon. It made the cut. It's less "Right" than it is "Good." It's a bad story that's good for us, even if we throw in the towel little more than halfway through, even if we know how it ends only because we cheated or the preacher told us. 

It's Holy Writ and human writ (not upper case), sometimes far more the latter than the former. 

I dare say loads--if not all--of our endless theological bickering is attributable to our varied understanding of the nature of scripture. On that score, I'm hardly an expert. Want one? You can find them by the dozen in varied hues. 

"Consider my servant Job," God says, as does the writer. After my own due consideration, I'm just saying what I can't help but think about what's in the Book of Job,  even if I cheated and skipped to the end.

I don't get Job, do you?

I'm sorry. I wish it weren't true, but I just don't know what to make of Job--the man or the book. He's well beyond me, and so is his story. 

So I'm to believe that Satan shows up one morning at the House of the Lord. He's not alone. He's come with the angels for what seems an ordinary or customary visit. Except for Satan. This morning, there he is, oddly enough. Does this happen often?--weekly, monthly? It just strange to me that Satan hangs around with the angels, and that he'd choose one morning, for no understandable reason, to show up at the Creator's place.

And it's not Satan who brings up this great man, Job. It's God himself. "Have you considered my man Job?" God asks, hanging the man out there like a sweet and soft target for the Evil One.

"I don't think he's the prize you make him out to be," the Devil says. "After all, you've blessed him with all the accoutrements of 'the good life.' Take the goods away, and he'll drop you like a bad habit."

It seems, anyway, that God gets taken in by old Scratch, because no sooner does the Devil tell Him that looks can deceive with respect to the saints, that God tells him it's okay with him if the Devil wants to take a shot at smashing Job's substantial moral compass without taking his life.

He's as much a part of fashioning "my servant Job" as a game the two of them are going to play as is Satan himself. The Creator is not without complicity in the whole wretched mess.

Then, holocaust: property nixed, herds destroyed, kids dead, Job wracked by some awful skin diseases--it's not pretty. That Job would kick about his fate makes all kinds of sense. Let it be known, he is a victim. He didn't deserve the punishing blows he suffered. Nothing he did brought on the calamities that beset him. Seems like a game to me, a competition licensed by God himself and perpetuated by His own mortal enemy, who, like a good neighbor, just that day had stopped over for coffee, maybe a glass of wine. 

Three guys with oddball names come by to sit with him in his misery, and then begins what amounts to the burden of the book, continuing conversation and debate about the whys and wherefores, endless bickering and battering that's not only trying but downright impossible to understand, forty long-winded chapters that go back and forth, back and forth with arguments of far, far more hot air than distinguishable substance. 

Forgive us, but my wife and I just sort of quit. We were reading Job every night, sometimes two and three chapters because Frederick Buechner says to in Beyond Words, which we've been reading. Buechner says to read the whole book. On we went. But we quit. We got twenty chapters in and threw in the towel. Couldn't take it.

The ghost town at Highland--out here between us and the Big Sioux--never had any more than ten buildings, all gone now, although I'm told the blacksmith shop still stands as a dilapidated garage on a farm a couple miles north. Otherwise, only graves remain at Highland. 

Two of the scant buildings of whatever number was once there were churches. That's right, two. Where two or three are gathered, there will probably be as many churches.

At least thirty chapters of the book of Job is bickering that appears to go absolutely nowhere. Job's wife has her own cameo role. "Curse God and die," she says to her pathetic husband. Job is not a cheery book. There ain't much rejoicing.

"The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." That's a moral that can be mined from the story, but it's not the line you're going to offer to someone who's just lost someone precious.

But it is, finally, the moral of the story, or so it means to me. Don't even attempt to understand your troubles, just rest in the assurance that God has his own very good reasons you're in the tank. 

For the last four weeks, our pastor has been preaching on the book of Job, and as close as I can tell what he'd say we're left with when we reach the end of the story is an experience of God that's just about total mystery. Sounds right to me.

There's always more to be said, and there is here too.

But to me, at least, no matter how you look at all the theological sparring, Job the book is a very, very strange document that may have more to teach us about the Bible than about the nature of Job's suffering--or ours.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Guilt

 

“For day and night your hand was heavy upon me.”

Psalm 32

“The gift that keeps on giving,” Garrison Keilor says, of guilt. I don’t know many Jewish folks, nor enough Roman Catholics to generalize, but my guess is that guilt likely runs as rampant among believers of all stripes as does allergies or acne or avarice—or, for that matter any of the other Seven Deadlies.

I’m guessing no single group or fellowship holds a patent on guilt, but here in the upper Midwest, children of the northern European Protestants—Calvinists, Lutherans, and their Mennonite friends—seem to have it in spades.

For three decades and more, Garrison Keilor has been trading on dark and somber types, me included. Today, he simply needs to mention the word “Lutheran,” and his listeners know exactly the darksome tone that is about to emerge from his tales.

There are tons of reasons for our excesses, I’m sure, but I’ll assert one of them—the degree to which we are affected by our environment; and here, on the Great Plains especially, the excesses of that environment.

Everything comes in spades where I live—winter’s cold, summer’s heat, rainfall, snow, drought, hail, tornadoes, and the ubiquitous, howling wind. It’s no wonder we’re losing population out here. Sometimes—like last week when a hot, spring windyou’re your face like a ratchet—I think General Pike was right: this really is the Great American Desert. For more than a century we’ve been hoodwinked by real estate crooks. Maybe we ought to sell the whole Upper Midwest to Ted Turner and his buffalo.

I’m wandering. We’re talking about guilt because that’s what David is talking about in verse three, and the weather in northwest Iowa is a long way off.

Here’s what I mean. In the land where I live, it’s almost impossible not to be a victim of the weather. A friend of mine moved to California; he said if he scheduled a game of golf, it took him more than a year to stop worrying about bad weather. There wasn’t any. Here, everything—including livelihood, much of it agricultural—is dependent on weather, and the weather is often dangerously wicked.

It’s a form of dependency, maybe, and because it is, it’s much harder not to believe in some higher power. Where I live, it takes some chutzpah to be arrogant when a 20-second hailstorm can get wipe you out completely.

For better or for worse, those who feel God’s hand in the daily regimen of life find it easier to believe. They know that when they’re safely in that almighty hand—when He’s holding us lovingly—we feel the greatest comfort life can offer.

But when that hand is pressing down upon us, the sober souls of Lake Woebegone know just as well, as did King David, that its weight is impossible to bear.

Perhaps what people say is true: “a guilty conscience needs no accuser.” But how much worse it is when the accuser is God almighty. That’s the heaviness David feels in his bones and joints, day and night, as he says.

Unrelenting. Laughter helps a great deal—thank you, Garrison. But David knows, from personal experience, that the only relief is forgiveness. That’s what Psalm 32 is all about.

The Old Log Church--our story

He was just eleven years old, he says, when he was at the post office one Saturday, a place where, back then, the news got out every two weeks, when all those rural folks would come by to pick up mail. What he heard that morning, he says, is that there was a mass grave in a place not all that far away. It was 1866. The Dakota War was four years behind them--if all that blood could ever be, and Norway Lake was close to the heart of all that warfare.

That mass grave, he was told, was seven miles away. The next day, Sunday, Gabriel Stene says he decided to have a look, so he started out, skirting lakes and passing lean-to homesteads where Norwegian bachelor farmers were trying to put down roots a cold new land. 

When he got to the place he'd been told he could find that grave--13 people buried together, all victims of what they called "the uprising"--the farmer, a man named Andrew Monson, was hitching up his horse for a Sunday visit to his brother's place; but he took the time to be kind enough to point out the location of that stone that marked the spot. 

Gabriel Stene may have been expecting more. He says, "I found the grave which was not much to see." It was, he says, "A sunken neglected grave overgrown with weeds." 

He was alone, just a kid. It was a Sunday morning. He'd walked seven miles to get there. "Being only 11 years old, it had a sad effect on my boyish mind and brought tears to my eyes. I tried to eat a dry sandwich but could not do it."

How much later he put this whole experience together, I don't know. But when he wrote down his memories of those early days around Norway Lake, he said he couldn't help thinking that what was there at that messy gravesite was his story too.

"A sunken neglected grave overgrown with weeds. But every weed had a story underneath," he says. "My roots rest in that remains of 13 of those of that little Swedish colony who dressed that fatal Sunday morning to go and listen to a religious service,. . .little knowing that the clothes they put on that morning were to be their funeral garb."

There's a whole lot more to the long story Gabriel Stone left for his descendants, for his people, for the settlement around the Old Log Church at Norway Lake, Minnesota. 

In 1862, people left the colony, scared and horrified, left in droves, afraid of more danger. All those  Norwegians and the Swedes were bound and determined to get far enough away from what none of them wanted to think about or remember. 

But once it seemed that solid peace created a quiet quilt across the region, once the Indians were gone, the settlers moved happily back in to a landscape that looked so much like home in Norway, lakes and hills and patches of hardwoods. Six years later, in 1868, enough of them had returned to build the original Log Church.

The church tells the story in its own history, printed up right there at the sight north and west of Wilmar. Those eight years were greatly busy; there were "490 baptisms, 72 weddings, 142 confirmations, and 77 burials." For the record, that is, on average, more than a baptism a week.

Thus, sure as anything, life went on, don't you know? 

You've got to admire a place so committed to remembering its own story--its own stories, with a replica log church in a corner of land so far off the beaten path you have to look hard to find it. But that replica church is only a part of of the saga. The signs tell stories and explain that if you might just like to know more, you can go the website, where you'll find Gabriel Stene's book full of stories, a man who remembers a Sunday morning hike during his childhood, a hike of seven miles to a place people claimed 13 people were buried in a mass grave. Well, you know that.

It's history, and it's precious, and you have to be careful how you tell it, don't you?--because it's like Gabriel says: even though he wasn't there exactly when it happened, even though he was just a little shyster, eight years old at the time, his own roots, and ours, roots of every color somehow rest there too. 

These days, it seems to me we're in sad shape because we don't know how to tell our story. My story?--sure. I can do that. And yours, too, I'm sure.

But not ours. That takes some hard thought. It's not as easy as it may look when you stand there in the country at the old Log Church.

Small Wonders--Rosalie La Flesche

[The third in a series of stories for KWIT on a famous family from the history of the Omaha people.]

Throughout her life Rosalie couldn't help but feel great pride in her illustrious siblings, a veritable "who's who" among the Omaha. Although she would not share the spotlight they did, she made her own mark on our history.

Those prominent siblings included elder sister Susette La Flesche went east for school and returned with the college education her father, Chief Iron Eye, wanted for all his children. She'd attained celebrity traveling with the Ponca chief Standing Bear and as an advocate for Native rights all over the east. "Bright Eyes," people called her.

Rosalie's little sister, Susan La Flesche became the very first Native American to graduate from medical school, then returned to practice medicine across the county, even building a hospital serving both Natives and whites. 

Sister Marguerite went east and as an accomplished teacher at the government agency school on the reservation.

Half-brother Frank went east, returned as an ethnologist, and devoted his life to recording and preserving the history of the Omaha people, and their Osage neighbors.

Sister Rosalie also got an education, but didn't go out east to get it. She stayed home--which may well be a good way to describe her life: "Rosalie La Flesche Farley, stayed home," handling a load that required considerable heavy lifting. Rosalie and her husband had ten children, loved and educated them all, and spent decades staying put on the reservation, helping her Omaha people.

In the 1880s, what the Omaha feared was being death-marched off to Indian Country, or moved anywhere over the chess board the southern plains had become. They'd seen the Ponca, Ioway, Pottawatomie, and Kickapoo pushed out to get them out of the way of white settlers gobbling up land.

Some recommended getting a head start on what would eventually be the Dawes Act (1887). Each Omaha head of household could claim a piece of paper designating specific acres as their own, what white people called "deeds," to guarantee no one could run them off traditional tribal land. 

Submitting required registration, the paperwork that goes with government programs, Rosalie La Flesche Farley found herself in the middle of that mess. No one was better fitted, however: she had an education, was fluent in Omaha and English, and had spent years managing the funds from Susette’s lectures for the benefit of the entire Omaha tribe. What’s more, she was adept at managing the family’s large stock feeding business.

Lot lines on land that just a decades before beheld roaming buffalo herds seemed perfectly ridiculous to the Omaha and wasteful to white squatters who didn’t care what the government did or proposed. The land distribution, meant to help Native people, became a painful legacy, and Rosalie was in the middle of the mess that too often turned friends of both cultures into enemies. In the closing years of the 19th century, she was not just the quarterback of the whole land use operation, she was, in essence, head coach of the whole tribe in direct business dealings on leases, rents, and other government projects on the reservation.

The years of her diary list a compendium of responsibilities:

I think Mother doesn't have the right food or her foot would be better.

Wrote for Little Deer and wife for three dollars worth of groceries at grove. We ate and Conlin came to have Me interpret. 

Five Chiefs wife came by and got her things. Did a little washing and sewed balance of day. Henry Ward here. Ed helped him get $5.00 worth of groceries from Hobbs. Going to bed early half past ten.

For nearly two decades Rosalie stayed home and held things together, both the family and the tribe. 

Her brother Francis tells a story about the day three boys determined to run away from school and follow the tribe on the hunt instead. When they were returned, Francis was put down on the floor, his hands tied behind him around the leg of a table. Soon, flies started to eat him up, he says, and a chicken pecked at his toe. 

Then he realized someone was coming. "A little figure cautiously approached the door, looked all around, and then came up to me." There he sat, as wrinkled up as some ancient breechcloth. "It was Rosalie," he says. 

Little Rosalie brought him a drink and stayed at his side, brushing away flies. Francis never forgot.

Rosalie stayed home. 

And there's this. No matter how much ink her siblings received and still receive today, look at any map of Thurston County, Nebraska, and you'll see only one “Rosalie.” She's the only La Flesche sibling who has a town named in her honor.

Her tombstone in the Bancroft cemetery states: “The nobility of strength of two races were blended in her life of Christian faith and duty.” For decades, she just mostly stayed home.

Only a bit of normal

I'll regret this. I shouldn't say it, shouldn't even think it, but the truth of the matter is I'm just darn sick of summer. It's the 20th of October, and yesterday, late afternoon, I came in from working out back and felt a burn again on my bald head. A ring had formed around my collar, sweat was running down my cheeks, and even the waistband of my skivvies was wet. 

It wasn't hot. It was just warm, so un-October warm, in fact, that a trip to Minnesota last weekend was, well, summer-like, the trees, normally spectacular in mid-October, were endlessly, boring emerald. It's as if the world around us had run out of gas or refused the services of a good freeze. A good, old-fashioned frost would have turned the whole world into an artist's palette. Instead, no--instead, this from Mt. Tom in Sibley State Park. Last weekend!!! Just shouldn't be.

Beautiful? yes. But October? no. It's just plain boring, and it's wrong. Things are not supposed to be this way. The world is out of whack. 

This is the how things should be. Last year.

I know. . .I know--in a month or so I'll be trying to take this all back. In two months I won't be able to get out of our back door because ye old drift has moved back into place, as comfortably as it does every winter. In three months, I'll be sick of the dang cold. In four, I'll be wondering why we never spend time in Arizona, even though we used to live there.

Today?--rain, or so the forecast reads. Today, we start a week of 50s. But then, next week, a gentle rise again. 

Global warming, you think? 

In 1976, we'd just moved to Iowa from Arizona. At just about this time of year, an old friend and colleague told me as we were leaving the school parking lot--I remember where he said it, the exact spot, in fact!--that he was so darn anxious for winter. 

Stopped in my tracks--seriously? I thought. Ready for this?

No. Not me. Not really.

Still, a week of the fifties sounds really good. And a hearty frost to kill off those blasted bugs. That too. 

I'm not asking for much, I swear. Only normal, okay? Only a bit of normal.

"Day of Rage"

At the beginning, this woman stands up front of a bus full of patriots, people who obviously believe in this nation, want the best for their children's future, and are damned sure that some horrific American villany is afoot: Democrats, have conspired to rob Donald Trump, of the Presidency of these United States. The scam can be remedied only by overturning the lie those Democrats engineered, by stopping the steal. They're coming to Washington to make their concerns real, coming from every state in the union, at the behest of their fearless leader, the one who will, as one of them says just a few seconds farther into the video, help them save "our way of life."

Thus, they--and the filmmakers--begin with this patriotic moment when the entire bus full of patriots recite together, proudly and from the heart, the Pledge of Allegiance. These are Trump's people, flag-waving, loyal, peace-loving patriots. Have no doubt.

The New York Times has done us all a favor by painstakingly putting together footage from a thousand phones used to record the events of January 6. They collected information from hundreds of sources in an attempt to review exactly what did happen and how what happened happened. The result of devastating.

Day of Rage documents the madness Republicans would rather not see or remember. Day of Rage destroys the lie that what happened that day wasn't a whole lot different than any other day of tourists coming into the Capital building. Day of Rage does part of the job the congressional committees are and should be doing, collecting information, spreading it out on the table before them, and recreating what went on. Day of Rage is devastating. It should be required viewing in every high school civics class in the nation, my wife says, and she's right.

Most of the protestors truly believe that people like me, a Democrat, secretly want America to become Stalinist Russia. They believe that the political cabal who stole the election meets secretly to plot the destruction of American democracy, that people like me, "a lib," want big government to take over and take away the power of the people, "our rights." That's what Trump tells them.

Right now, as many as sixty percent of the Republican party believes "the big lie." And more lies have been born. In order to justify their faith, they need to follow the lead of dozens of their own, like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who maintains that nothing untoward happened on January 6. "The Big Lie," lo and behold, has bred a dozen others.

Day of Rage is forty minutes long. School board meetings would become even more cantankerous, I'm sure, should good high school teachers determine to show the video. Communities around the nation already suffer from a teacher shortage; new openings would proliferate as conservatives would seek more scalps. 

Still, I think everyone should watch it. Just so everyone knows, just so they understand the truth behind "the big lie."

Here it is. See for yourself. 

The Acton "Incident"

We stumbled on the place, literally. I knew we were in the area, but I didn't know where we'd have had to look to find the place where the Dakota boys, on what seems to have been a whim, put up a dare to each other--who among 'em would be scared to kill the white people who'd come along and determined to live on their land?

The game was as stupid as it was evil. The dare turned into murder: a man, a woman, another man, a boy, a girl. Five Little-House-on-the-Prairie types left behind in the dirt, random puddles of blood. The dead are named on the old monument set there more than a century ago. That panel was in a shadow when we stopped, but then I suppose the names are immaterial right now.

But the legacy of what happened here is anything but forgotten. When the boys, hungry from a long unsuccessful hunt, found some eggs in a nest in the grass; one of the kids said to eat them, another said no--they belonged to the white man. So the game of chicken got triggered.

Some historians consider what happened here to have been the very first act, maybe even a prelude to Great Sioux Wars that consumed the lives of thousands of Americans on both sides and wouldn't conclude until the massacre at Wounded Knee just about forty years later, wars that left this country, then a new nation, terribly scarred.

Today, "The Acton Incident" is remembered right here, in the backyard of a farm where dinner was being served when we stopped and harvest was going on--right there, the yard full of equipment, so close you can't help but feel you're trespassing.

The new historical marker is written in what you might call more "inclusive" language. It's an "incident." What happened here might be thought of as cold-blooded murder, but not today. Today, the boys were "returning to their hungry families," which was true. Today, what happened is an "incident."

Still, when the murderers returned to their bands, Shakopee's Dakota Band, council's were held. What would the people do?

They were hungry, and their way of life was vanishing, painfully, before their eyes. They felt imprisoned in a sliver of land afforded them by a treaty white people seemingly didn't honor--settlers kept moving in anyway. Finally, after much discussion, their leader, Little Crow, conceded to the fury of his warriors:

See!--the white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one--two--ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one--two--ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count. . . .Braves, you are little children--you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon.

And thus it began, here, at this out-of-the-way spot, spitting distance from a farm house where yesterday, when we stopped, I'm guessing Sunday dinner was just then being served.

Hard to believe, really. But then, we'd all rather not remember.

Sunday Morning Meds--Commitment

“Commit your way to the LORD.” Psalm 37:5

Just returned from the website of a couple of students I had in a writing class three or four years ago. I hadn’t known that their nuptials were finally going to happen. I got an e-mail from the new husband—one of those mass e-mails—that directed family and friends to check out the wedding pix on their website. There were hundreds.

Both kids I liked, a lot. I really wanted them to get married, and, quite frankly, I think they lolly-gagged far too long. Like most twenty-somethings today, they dawdled, finding it difficult, I suppose, to commit. I’m not sure what it is about their generation, but drawing a bead on the future—marriage, profession—seems really arduous task for them. It is, I guess. Or should be.


No matter. I’m glad the two of them finally got married. I looked over some of the pictures—fairly typical stuff—a bunch of friends at the night-before barbeque and the rehearsal; then the wedding, some standard shots, many nice ones taken in the bride’s family’s orchard, fruit trees running down away from a family of smiling faces.

I wonder what happened. I wonder how they finally determined that this courtship of theirs—a good chunk of it carried on with a half a continent between them—was actually finally going to end in ceremony. Maybe one of them said it was time to fish or cut bait.

Thirty years ago, when my wife and I got married, it was easier to make commitments, perhaps because, as children of an ethnic and religious ghetto, the length and breadth of this world didn’t seem as endless, the dangers as immediate, or the choices as wide. The world seemed smaller, more manageable; commitment didn’t loom so ominously. Half of the wedding pictures people snap during this summer’s round of nuptials will be burned within the next few years—or simply deleted. Lots of marriages fail. They had reason to pause, I suppose.

Commitments aren’t easy for any of us. Yesterday’s newspaper told the story of a local soccer star who had signed to play for a college after getting all sorts of ink for committing to a different one several months ago. So much for that commitment.

“Commit the Lord,” the verse says—buckle yourself in, sign on the dotted line, become part of a team, draw up a contract, become a part of something.

Commitments are daunting because, once made, choice goes cold; and our world today finds nothing as precious as the freedom to choose. Commit to a college and your choosing is behind you. Commit to a spouse, and you’ll have to pick up your clothes and hang ‘em in the closet. Commit to God—and what?

Commit to God, and pack up all the other commitments and relationships—love of money, love of fame, love of power—and most of all, love of self. Commitment, an act of will, means giving yourself away. There are great rewards in committing to the Lord, but there’s some cost: yourself. The very essence of religious experience—you choose the faith—is the denial of self. Maybe that’s why we balk so easily, kids especially, in this affluent age.

The road before my former students, now married, is straight and narrow. But love is worth it. Love is best.

I pray those pictures will last.

Second Cut iv -- finis

The next morning Edgar realized very soon that the funeral would be an important event to the community.  From all parts of the surrounding countryside, the staid farmers and their families descended on the village.  The church was full of friends and relatives, coming to pay their respects and express their deep sympathy to the family.  Edgar saw no smiles there.  He heard the community's grief in the tolling of the bell and felt their mournful acceptance in the heavy rhythmical chanting of the Psalms.  But no, as he walked east, he could remember little else from yesterday's funeral, for his eyes and thoughts had wandered from the caskets to the families, over the large assembly of worshipers before him, and finally to Cornelius Den Boer, whose eyes stared at the pulpit.

But the funeral wasn't the end.  The atmosphere of the village was laden with emotion that day, as men acknowledged each other on the street but rarely paused to exchange conversation.  The women spoke quietly to each other, congregating in little groups of two and three, the July sun beating down heavily, but only the corn profited from its strength.

Edgar kicked at a lump of dry clay along the road.  Today was another day.  The effect of the tragedy of last Sunday lessened, and while the drownings and their meaning would certainly continue to be heard in the dark blacksmith shop, Edgar knew that most people understood it was time to continue and overpower yesterday's agony.

He kept walking along the rutted trail.  His father's business had brought contact with many farmers, and frequently he had been requested to help with work which had piled up beyond the control of one man.  Today was such a day.  One of his father's American customers had second cut of hay to do and needed some help.

The farm lay closer to the lake than the village and some distance to the north.  The walk was pleasant this morning, the sun just beginning to breathe its warmth into the cool lake air which still lay over the lakeshore area.  From scattered farms, all neatly kept, dairy cows wandered out to pasture, their morning milking over.

Eventually he saw Jung's farm.  Tall pines grew all around the homestead, giving it shade from the sun and a shield from the wind.  He could already see his employer walking in front of the barn.  Edgar had worked for this man before and was happy to return.  Mr. Jung had treated him well in the past, and Edgar quietly enjoyed his jovial but salty tongue.  Mrs. Jung always prepared massive feasts, and her husband paid as well as any of the farmers of the area, better than most Hollanders.

Jung waved as he saw Edgar approach.  Edgar raised his arm and waved a reply.  The early morning sun had now nearly rid the ground of the dew which temporarily postponed the work, and Edgar knew he would spend little time talking.

"So, Hartman," he said, "are you ready to work?"

"Ja, Mr. Jung," Edgar replied.  "Good to see you again."

Jung removed the faded black hat he wore for work and wiped the sweat which had already formed on his forehead.  A thick-standing crop of gray hair stood proudly above a ruddy, red-nosed face, round and full, the kind of face that begged a smile.  Edgar, despite his years, already stood above the man, but Jung's weight certainly surpassed the boy's.  Packed into the shirt and pants he wore was a torso of lumpy and uneven bulk.  He replaced the battered hat and looked back to Edgar.

"Hartman," he said, "let's see once, what Mama has."

Edgar willingly consented, and Jung put his hand on his shoulder to lead him to the house.  They sat down on a step before the house, and the old man roared for service.  The humid air provoked more sweat from his blue-lined temples, as the temperature rose with the sun.

"Mama," he roared, "I want a beer and one for Hartman too." The command had been given, and a graying woman returned to the kitchen after greeting the visitor.

"So tell me, Hartman, what do the Hollanders say about the two boys who drowned on Sunday?"

"Their funeral was yesterday, Mr. Jung.  Many people were there."

"Yep, it's a terrible thing, what happened."

"Ja, terrible," Edgar repeated.

"The two boys were good boys.  Van Ess, he worked here for me too.  The other one I don't know.  But they're too young, huh, to die already."

"Ja, they were only 18." Edgar was reluctant to talk about the deaths anymore, but the old man sat on the step, looking as if he had more to say.  His belly hung over his thighs.

"The Hollanders send them to Hell, I suppose?" An ironic smile spread across his face and grew into a belch of a laugh that exploded out of his round chest.  He shook his head in mock disbelief.  "They're good boys, Hartman.  What does your father say?"

"My father is sad."

"Sure," the old man went on, "the lake, it's been rough, you know.  Those boys shoulda’ bin more careful."

Mrs. Jung returned silently with two short glasses of beer, offering them to the men.

"Hartman, you drink a beer with me? Some of your people don't like it."

Edgar sipped the luke-warm beer and assented with a faint, sarcastic laugh.  He was miles from Oostburg now.

"The lake was too dangerous, Hartman. Those boys, should not bin swimming.  They shoulda’ known. They was born here."

When Jung's glass was nearly empty, he was back on his feet.

"We go now, there is much work today."

Edgar swallowed the heavy brew and rose to his feet.  The sun was beating down on the Wisconsin countryside.  The burly old farmer tipped his glass to the sun and the beer was gone.  He walked to the barn, where his team waited.

Edgar watched Jung closely.  He saw his father again and heard the rhythmical clang of the hammer on the anvil.  He glanced at his own nearly emptied glass, then poured the remaining contents into the light dirt of the path to the barn.

The lake air was hot and heavy, and the day would be long and hard.

Second Cut iii -- the argument

 Den Boer removed his hat and hung it on a convenient nail.  Edgar knew his visit would not be short, and the conversation itself would continue for a long time.  It seemed only a year ago that he had heard some of these things, for then, he remembered, it was the death of his niece, a little girl who had died unexpectedly of diphtheria.  But Den Boer mentioned very plainly that the boys were known to many women, and when Edgar heard such specific reference to sin, he worked even more intently to hide his embarrassment.

The old man did most of the talking, Edgar's father responding infrequently, trying vainly, it seemed, to restrain Den Boer.  As time passed, the old man's speech slowed considerably, and each word was chosen more carefully.  He sat and swayed evenly from side to side on the retired keg.

"People say that their teams led them home many nights after the tavern closed.  But it is not only them, Henry, it is others too.  Many others, they say, are spending their time in the ways of the world.  These are our children.  We pray daily for them, but it seems of no use . . . the children of the covenant . . . ." Edgar glanced up to see Den Boer slowly shake his head.

"These are new times, Cornelius," his father offered, slowly, the ring of the anvil underlining each phrase.  "All the ways of the old country may not be taken so easily any more.  We live here, in a new country.  We covet the strength only the Lord can give us to see through the difficult times."

"Ach, Hartman, the Sabbath has not changed since we come to this country.  My commandments read today the same like yesterday.  We must change because of this new country?"

"The Lord's will is not always so easy to know." Edgar followed his father's gesture and forced a rush of air into the fire through the dusty bellows.  Although the tempo of the work remained constant, the intense conversation finally began to wane, both participants wearying of the traditional arguments.

Cornelius sat silent; tiny whiffs of smoke rose like signals from the human statue.  He was shifting and reorganizing himself, preparing for the last advance.  His thorny hands moved slowly around the bowl of the pipe, withdrawing it, then placing it back within his tightly drawn lips.

Henry pointed at the door, signaling his son to let in the air.  Edgar pushed through the stagnant cloud of smoke and threw both doors open to the street, blocking them open with iron poles.  The midday sun brightened the shop's interior, and the fresh lake air rescued the men from the strangulation of an atmosphere thickened by steam and smoke.  Shadows that danced and leaped against the walls were erased by the sun's penetration; the light from the fire faded in the face of the afternoon sun.  Cornelius shifted his position to look out on the town.  The triangular hitch hissed wildly as Edgar's father buried it in the cooler.

"The dominie has to preach on these things.  The people must understand that the Lord speaks to us in these things." Den Boer spoke through the open door as if addressing the street.  His eyes stared into the little community, until, finally, his arms reached down to the rim of the keg and he lifted himself slowly from his seat.

"I must go now, Henry," he said, turning back to the shop and retrieving his hat.  He buttoned his coat once again and stepped into the doorway.

"Tomorrow is the funeral."

__________________________________ 

Tomorrow: finis