Morning Thanks--Homecoming

It was a sweet opportunity. From the moment it was offered, I knew it would be, for me at least, a joy. It's been 55 years since I graduated from high school and a building that, years ago already, was used-up and torn down, outgrown in the village where I grew up. 

By chance (my Calvinist dad used to tell me there's no such thing as chance), a former student is teaching these days in the new high school; she asked if I'd like to speak to her creative writing class because, she said, she mentioned me as someone who did some writing and was actually, like them, from Oostburg, Wisconsin.

That she's a darn good teacher wasn't surprising. She had them primed to meet me, via Zoom, a medium they're far more used to, thanks to Covid, than I am. So there I was, looking into a room full of high school kids (24--a big class) and at a young woman I remember for being as full of talent as she was personality. 

First question: "What was Oostburg like when you were a kid?"

I can't help but think that they must have felt I was stalking them, moving back and forth, up close to my computer's camera, then back again, all in an effort, I think now, to get out of the blasted screen.

It was an understandable question, not something I didn't anticipate; but it did assume I had some level of understanding of what it was like to live in Oostburg today--which, I don't, my visits, at best, spotty through the years. 

I don't remember exactly what I said, but I did reach for history, explained that the town was much bigger today, that there was no I-43 scooting by just east of town to manage the buzz of traffic between Milwaukee, Green Bay, and "up north." For work, that highway made commuting to Milwaukee possible, and thus planted all kinds of new housing along the lakeshore--in all probability, some of their houses. 

I told them we used to hang out along Lake Michigan's shoreline, in the swampy woods and dales and sand dunes. I told them today they wouldn't be welcome where we were free as seagulls. I told them I remembered driving over the frozen sand in winter. Today, they'd be arrested. But I told them they were blessed to grow up in a place as beautiful as the Wisconsin lakeshore. 

I said I remembered that the population back then was 898--for some dumb reason, that number sticks. I asked them what it was today. No one seemed to know. I took a guess--maybe three times that. I told them growing up in Oostburg these days must be much different.

But we talked about writing too, about how to get over writer's block, about how to know what to write, about finding material and making it good, about why writing is a good thing. I told them how when I was their age and working at Terry Andrea State Park, I sold a park sticker to a bunch of kids from Milwaukee, who'd come in pulling a rack of canoes. I told those writing students it was windy that day and I knew it was really dumb to think anybody could canoe in the big lake, especially when the water was rough.

But I didn't tell the canoe gang as much. I didn't mention it because the kids were all about my age, and I didn't want to be somebody's old picky aunt, harping. I sold them the sticker. I let them in.

Four drowned. 

Later, the boss blew up, told me I should have warned them. "You were born here," he told me, meaning I should have known better.

I told those OHS kids that story. I said I went home that night and, after my folks were in bed, for some dumb reason I took out a piece of paper and just started writing stuff--what, exactly, I don't know.

"No," I said, "I don't have that piece of paper." I told them what I said probably wasn't even all that wonderful or important. But I somehow got the sense that if I tried to write how I felt, it might help. 

Even though I was sitting at this very desk, 500 miles west, I just can't help but think that story got in to their minds--and maybe, if I'm blessed myself, into their hearts. While Oostburg may not be at all the same as it was 55 years ago, there's something in our human character that has never, ever changed and likely won't. 

Music can make years and even differences disappear, but so can writing. "I don't really know what I think until I try to write it." I shouldn't use quotes because I'm not sure right now of her exact wording, but I'm repeating something Flannery O'Connor once wrote or said, something that has struck me. 

I had a great time. I hope that big class did too. This morning, I'm still smiling, greatly thankful for the opportunity.

Poster for a reading on campus, Dordt College, 1979,
a poster done by Norman Mathias.

Pilgrimage

Trust me, I could tell you her story. I've been living with it for five years, although the Covid year (and more) can't be counted inasmuch as the tribe determined the entire Cheyenne River Reservation off-limits to anyone but its own. I couldn't get to Eagle Butte, South Dakota, even if I had tried, couldn't get in. She leveraged her own considerable tribal clout to get me in, but the quarantine wouldn't budge, even though Governor Noem, who was not her favorite anyway, got hoppin' mad about it. 

(Let's just say this about that. Marcella LeBeau, a matriarch among her Cheyenne River people, was never hesitant about becoming an old Testament prophet, found it her role, in fact, more than once during her many, many years.)

But she couldn't get me in, so the work stopped and the book never really got finished before she died just last week, 102 years old. Cancer got her finally, took her home to the Spirit World, she would say. 

You may have read her obituary. The Associated Press did one, and it got picked up by newspapers all over the country. She was a war hero, an Army Nurse during the Battle of the Bulge. There may well have been more Lakota Army nurses during WWII, more Native American nurses, but I don't know of any. She was most proud of serving her country, a country she was not at all ashamed or afraid of criticizing angrily for the way it has treated this nation's Indigenous, including, of course, the Lakota people.

I won't try to tell the story. It's been condensed wonderfully and is now available all over the internet. Here's the AP's obituary.  My version is 150 pages longer.

So, I missed the funeral. Misdirected or mistaken, I arrived exactly one day late. Things like that happen on the reservation, but they're not supposed to happen to old white men. The funeral was Saturday; I was sure it was Sunday, a massive snafu, but it all worked out, as things often do way out there. Had I been in Eagle Butte on time on Saturday, I would have been one of a huge crowd. I wouldn't have had much time with her family. Yesterday, I sat in her house for the last time with a goodly bunch of LeBeaus who were sitting around remembering, occasionally dabbing at their eyes. That was a blessing I wouldn't have had.

I'd planned to go to Promise, the town where she lived as a child. I'd been there before, with her, seen all the important places. Her church (or at least the contemporary manifestation there of)

And her neighborhood--a house her father built long, long ago

"Neighborhood" doesn't quite seem to cover it really. Yesterday, alone, I visited the immense landscape in which she was raised (she'd be happy I said it that way, so proud she was of her heritage). My best camera is simply not big enough to get that landscape in, but here's a fragment

And the cemetery (see it?--behind the convoy of trees) where her mother and father, her sister and brothers, already gone, greeted her, I'm sure. 

That's where I found her, a place I'm sure she wanted to be--

I was alone, which is maybe the best way to visit cemeteries anyway. But yesterday's mile-long caravan that came all the way out to the Promise cemetery from Eagle Butte--a long trip, considerable chunks of which are on gravel--had left its mark all around, including this touching imprint, a child's hands in the dirt--

The funeral was live-streamed on Facebook, I was told, so I can watch it at my leisure. The pilgrimage I needed to take was a trip alone to a little town named Promise, where I'd been before when I'd asked Marcella to take me to the places most near and dear to her heart. I'd stood here before to meet her mother, who died here when Marcella was just ten years old

And her father, an Irish-American who'd come out to the reservation to work for the government, putting up housing, when he met a woman. . .well, you know that story.

I was out there, alone, Sunday, November 28, 2021, my own mother's birthday, among a people not much my own

and yet, yesterday, out there very much my own, among fellow pilgrims in this incredibly wide and limitless world, this immense, jaw-dropping creation of an Almighty who is, it seems, forever bigger than our fullest grasp, always out of reach but never far away.

It was a holy experience, a Sabbath all its own. 

Morning Thanks--Thanksgiving

 

Thanksgiving Thanksgiving*

 

Some people may be accustomed to scarfing down such huge platefuls of turkey and stuffing in the middle of the day, but I'm not one of them. Thanksgiving dinner--for which we all give thanks--is just so thick and starchy (heavy-laden with gravy that honors our departed Grandma, whose recipe it is) that by two or so in the afternoon, it's a wonder the whole adult family hasn't passed out.

That's why I like to hike on Thanksgiving afternoon, even though there's not all that much daylight by late in the day. We drive out to Oak Grove, a wooded park along the Big Sioux, and work off some of the excess after the Thanksgiving extravaganza. But this year it was too blame cold, a sharp northwest wind icy enough to take a bite out of your face, the windows still thick with Jack Frost.

The bowling alley's long gone, so I asked my daughter if there were any movies playing downtown, something appropriate for her kids, which is to say our grand kids. Yeah, she said, so three blocks was the best I could do for a hike--straight west to the theater, where we donned special glasses and watched Tangled, Disney's version of the Repunzel story in a 3-D version so real my grandson and I kept reaching for butterflies when they came floating past.

In David Brooks' last column in the NY Times, he quotes that odd Christian curmudgeon Tolstoy like this: “The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.” I sat there beside my tow-head, second-grade grandson, watched him lose himself in the story, and told myself that there's so much I just haven't learned about stories, like what they're all about, after all. He was teaching me. I was learning new stuff from him because between the two of us, we were dead lost, him loving the story, me in him loving it. And him.

I watched him turn away disgustedly as little boys do when finally Repunzel and her sweetheart thug-turned-saint finally, delightedly, kiss. He just couldn't watch. When the two of them faced sure death by drowning, when it looked like the end was near, he flipped off those glasses and looked up at the ceiling, sure, I guess, the whole story was going to come crashing down on him like a third-rate garage door. I watched Tangled through my grandson's eyes, and when he snuggled up against me during all that high Disney tension, I felt the tremors in his heart and soul.

I came out of that theater telling myself that it's no dang wonder I haven't figured out how to finish that novel of mine because I hadn't been thinking of what it's all about, hadn't seen the wonder in my grandson's bespectacled eyes or thought at all of trying to making sure that novel offers people what Tolstoy says it must--the sheer joy of loving life.

Disney snatched a few tears out of me on the holiday--I'll admit it. Maybe one or two because all things worked together for good in that zany, hairy movie, but also because my grandson lent me, for two hours, his child's heart, an act that gave that movie even more wonder than anything you could see through those plastic glasses.

This morning--three days later--I'm still on a high, and for all of that I give thanks. Thanksgiving thanksgiving.

Oh yeah, the meal was terrific and the pie was to die for. That too.

__________________

Yes, also a repeat. That tow-head is now a college student. . .with a girlfriend who, his older sister says, he hangs on far too much.

On a dark Thanksgiving Eve*

 

"Pride" from Brueghel's Seven Deadly Sins

There's no electricity this a.m. A car slid off the road and took out a pole that carried all our energy. It's been dark, completely, for an hour. I'm trying to type on a tablet, and it's not going well.

Thanksgiving can be spontaneous and often is. It doesn’t always require practice or dogged devotion. Hard times in our family are somewhat safely behind us, thank the Lord, but all I have to do is stumble over an image or walk along a familiar road somewhere, and the dark days find a way to sneak back in, my personal PTSD.

In days of old, I smoked a couple of cigarettes a day out in the barn. Standing there in the frozen cold, I remember the smoke drifting down, dissipating slowly in air so motionless that it seemed I was exhaling ghosts.  But what I also remember is that the spirit-like shapes of the smoke drew me back to an earlier time standing out there, a time when my nerves felt torn to pieces by bloody warfare in church. Just like that, total recall, blindingly uninvited.

I have no trouble saying I'm thankful all of that is ancient history, even if I wouldn’t mind a smoke. When I remember that mess, I give thanks it's finished.

Still, thanksgiving doesn't come naturally for me. I have to work at it. I have to discipline myself to do it because I’m hopelessly “Emersonian,” buoyed by good old, rugged self-reliance.

That pride is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins seems perfectly obvious. There's some gluttony in me—especially this holiday weekend; a pinch of lechery I don’t like admitting; some greed, I imagine, but not a whole lot; lots of sloth, but, hey!—I’m retired. I'll admit to some envy too--a really great lens, for instance; and okay, I get angry, or did, before the elections. But none of those, in me, are really capital offenses.

But pride? That’s huge. I don't think I walk around with my nose in the air, but me-first-ness beclouds everything I do. Not arrogance--that’s a whole different line of work; but the driving determination that what matters most about my life and my times and my fortunes are my life and my times and my fortune. That I got. In spades.

Most of us thusly cursed come off the factory line that way; it takes rugged fight to bridle it, to love God above all and your neighbor as yourself. Far easier to say than to do. Such selfless regard is not human after all, it’s Godly, so much so that we know selflessness when we see it. And we remember it too.

That's why, speaking for myself at least, Thanksgiving turkey is medicine for the soul, a celebration of the discipline some of us sinners must be reminded to do--to give thanks. Gluttony may well be a sin this weekend, but tomorrow, I say, the end justifies the means.

Meanwhile, this morning I'm still swallowed by darkness, tapping away at the iPad. The refrigerator isn’t running, the freezer isn’t either. Green lights from a dozen appliances are doused, and the darkness is appalling. Cold is creeping up my back as I sit here at the kitchen counter.

I’ve not panicked yet, although the power’s been out for close to an hour.  What on earth does one do when there is no power? You get out the flashlights and light candles, and in the curse of darkness you almost certainly give thanks for what you have when you don't, as I am now. 

I conceded there's always cause for thanksgiving, and the list is eternal. Tomorrow, right after dinner, we could go around the table and go on forever. 

I just need a nudge, like Thanksgiving.  You too?  You got my permission to take an extra helping of stuffing tomorrow--if I've got yours.

This morning's thanks is for tomorrow's turkey or ham or spinach salad or those shocking cranberries. And once-a-year pie. This morning's thanks is simple enough: it's for Thanksgiving.

And light. Because it's back. The energy's on. Thanks, Lord, for that lineman in the hard hat just down the road, the one who spent a couple of cold hours up in the cherry-picker hitching up wires in the blowing snow. 

Make me good at it, Lord. Make it a discipline.

__________________________

*Yes, a re-run from just last year. 

Managing the Missouri

If it weren't for the Sgt. Floyd parked where 'tis along the river, it would be well- nigh impossible to begin to imagine a time--getting on 200 years ago--when 150-foot steamboats cruised (that's a fair weather word maybe) up and down the river between here and Omaha--or St. Louis.

But one needs to say only one word to understand why they ran so thick--'twas gold. Once the stuff was discovered in them thar hills, not even the 7th Cavalry, could keep fortune hunters out east and at home. First, it was Council Bluffs, then Sioux City that offered dreamers commodious starting blocks to the frontier and all the bucks that could be made there. All needed outfitting, of course, buying all sorts of things that could, back then, be supplied best by great hulking beasts that blew vile smoke as they stumbled--yes, stumbled--up a river that took great joy in having them for dinner, the Missouri.

In some places, I'm told, politicians get yanked out of office when trains don't run on time. "On time" is a language steamboats never understood. Their passage on the Missouri was totally dependent on how much water there was between the banks on any day of the week--or even hour of the day. 

A man named Charles Deatherage never forgot a passage his family booked to St. Louis in 1864, from someplace down river in Missouri. It's a mean story, and I wouldn't tell it if the steamer they'd booked had a different name--it was, as Deatherage never forgot--the Sioux City. That's right, the Sioux City.

His family arrived at its appointed landing on Thursday, bags packed, ready to go. Sadly, the Sioux City didn't show up until Tuesday, four days later--not four hours or four days, and there was no airport bar. Not enough water to float a boat. 

Once the crew lugged out the stage plank for passengers, the whole bunch scrambled aboard, he remembers, while the crew rolled in bundles of tobacco, hogsheads they were called, loading the ship up, well down is a better fit.

What Deatherage remembered was how the Sioux City navigated the shallow waters for the deepest flow, a route that took them so close to shore cottonwoods swept the passengers from the deck. What's worse, it was soon clear that the passenger list included a family with scarlet fever. In no time, the fever spread. Off to a great start.

One morning the captain, well aware this would be the last trip of the season, took a look at the shallow river and determined not to move but to stay right where they were, even though ice was starting to threaten. 

It was November, 1864. The Civil War was far from over, even if most of the action was far to the east. One morning they took aboard a Union soldier who was himself, Deatherage notes, as loaded as the Sioux City, maybe more so because when this guy spotted some human figures on a hill beside the river, he unloaded his revolver, which, in turn, meant those human figures let loose with a cavalcade that rained iron hail, prompting the Captain to scream "full speed ahead" and demand passengers take cover behind the walls of the state rooms. 

Wasn't over yet. A day later, the Sioux City ran aground on a sandbar, one of those so frequent on the Missouri that steamships armed themselves with huge spar poles that enabled the crew to hoist the whole ship up just far enough to swing it forward, like a pair of giant grasshopper legs, time after time, to get it to deeper water. Blessedly, this time the spar poles worked, he says, but all of that took another three days. 

This is November, remember. During the night, the ice flow got heavy. When the people woke up the next morning, they were looking at a triangular ice cube a hundred feet or more out front.

When the river inexplicably deepened again, the Sioux City kept going for two whole days before the Missouri once more spread forever wide and a couple feet deep. Things seemed hopeless, so the good ship backtracked to a landing where they'd languished before, where the good Captain threw in the towel and sent the passengers to St. Louis via the Missouri Southern Railroad.

That night, Deatherage says, "We arrived in St. Louis about midnight." And then, dolefully, "the Sioux City came down about two weeks later." 

Just another grand voyage. Traveling up the Missouri was something akin to riding a bull, same grueling passage, whether you stay on or fall off.

Steamboat Sioux City wrecked by ice in Omaha

Office call

The Clinic

She was clearly uneasy, no irritated--maybe that's a better word. She might well have been rolling her eyes--it wasn't bright inside the clinic and I didn't want to stare. I was an spectator just then, a surprise, I'm sure. Even though I was white and foreign, I seemed not to gather much of her attention. She was mad, really, and while I didn't know a word of the language she, her mother, or the professional were using, that she was exasperated was evident.

We were visiting a tiny medical clinic Niger, an office/hospital operated by a Christian man, a nurse, whose distinguishing facial scars made clear to display his clan or tribe. He was rarity, a Christian believer serving up medical care in the world overwhelmingly Muslim around him. But he was loved--that was clear. He was soft-spoken but firm--and he was busy. Outside the clinic, night had fallen.

We'd already learned enough about place and time. It was the season for malaria again, an annual plague, and the woman--she was pregnant--was worried about herself, her temperature, her headaches, her pains. She wasn't young. To my own Western sensitibilities, she seemed a bit too old to be with child. 

He spoke to her kindly, telling her that he thought she was just fine, that she shouldn't worry any more because he was quite sure she things were going well and so with the baby. The older woman, the pregnant one, sat; the girl stood behind her. She said nothing, but her face, even her clenched hands, communicated just as clearly as her voice might have. Something about all of this she didn't like. Not at all.

Once they'd left, I asked the medical worker about it--why the young woman seemed so exasperated. 

He smiled, as if to say I didn't need to be concerned. It was nothing. He said the girl who'd taken the pregnant woman in was probably another wife of the father of baby soon to make his or her place on the world stage. He smiled again, as if I might have some trouble understanding, and then told me that maybe the young wife thinks is somehow unseemly for the older one to be pregnant, at her age, a kind of jealousy maybe. She'd rather the man would pay more attention to her.

The medical man was right--what did I know about life with multiple wives? Nothing. 

It was incredible, fascinating. I was a long, long way from home. But startling and unforeseen revelations are always a blessing. Two wives--one young, one not so--were jealous of each other. Wow. 

But then he said there could be another reason. Maybe the two of them were quarreling on the way here. Maybe the pregnant one was the younger woman's mother, and she was angry at her mother for getting pregnant again. Maybe it was nothing more than a family spat--you know, her daughter's just plain tired of her mother.

One story was strange and unfamiliar, exotic like nothing I'd ever imagined. But the other, so ordinary it could have happened in New York or California or Iowa. One was African and peculiarly tribal; the other was just plain ordinary.

I loved the hubby envy, as foreign as the ID scars cut into the nurse's cheeks.

But then, maybe they argued on the way to the clinic. Maybe the girl was exasperated at her mother's getting herself all pregnant again, right then too, when malaria is just now lurking everywhere. Maybe it was just, "Oh, Mom, geez, really?"

One is rare and odd and foreign. The other, even here in Muslim Niger, is just plain human. 

You choose.

The office

 

Sunday Morning Meds--Hidden Faults

St. Mark's Church, Rome

“. . .clear thou me from hidden faults” 

Psalm 19:12

Whenever I mow a certain patch of grass in my backyard, thirty feet west of our back door, an incident comes back to me that some lingering memory in me will not let die. What I feel when mowing the grass right there is something of shock, anger, envy, and pain. And the incident happened two decades ago.

When my daughter was in middle school, she was quite unceremoniously booted from the clique in which she’d been running. She cried for an entire day, nearly refused to go back to school, and wouldn’t eat. Her father didn’t understand. Her mother did—she’d once a middle school girl.

Why that incident rises specter-like from my mowing a certain section of backyard is Hitchcockian, I suppose; but what I feel at that moment—every summer weekend—is embarrassingly identifiable—it’s anger, rage. Even though the mower is roaring, a certain junior high girl flashes her fangs from my memory, while her parents smile innocently. That’s what I see. I’m fine when I get to the sidewalk.

My daughter, our oldest child, was suffering, and her father, himself a child as a parent, was only beginning to understand that about some things he couldn’t do a blasted thing. I hated both the kid and her parents, and that hate apparently found a place in my memory to settle permanently.

My daughter went on to high school, college, marriage, a career, and mother of three
beautiful kids. The girl who tossed her out is married with kids, too. I don’t hate her any more than I do our friends, themselves just as proud grandparents as we are. But every time I mow a certain patch of grass—I swear it!—I get dragged back to a painful moment in my life as a father by a memory I don’t even control. Makes no sense.

Not long ago I was visiting a classroom where students were required to read some fiction I’d written. In preparation, I looked those stories over, not having read them for some time. When I did, what returned, as fully as my weekly mowing pain, was my state of mind when I wrote certain passages. No one else on the face of the earth would recognize what I felt, but reading those stories were like turning back the pages in an emotional journal I don’t actually keep but is nonetheless mysteriously kept for me by something in my mind or my heart or my soul—I don’t know which.

Maybe I’m going too far here. Maybe what David intends in this prayerful petition is simply that the Lord clean out those sins he’s not aware of, those sins of omission. We all have those too, at least I do.

But when I become captive of some spooky part of my own sub-consciousness, I can’t help but be amazed at the sheer power of the human mind and spirit, and of the depth of our darkest memories. There’s more going on than we are aware of, Horatio, even in our own minds and hearts.

Whatever’s there, David begs, clean it up. Whatever I’m forgetting or missing or not acknowledging, make it shine, Lord. Forgive me. That’s what’s he’s saying.

Review--The Jesuit Guide

It was an odd choice for a circle of ancient Calvinist cronies, although the book came highly recommended by some younger cohorts, none of whom were Roman Catholic. Then again, let it be said that The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything is can't be read on a single Sabbath afternoon. It's not particularly tough sledding, but it's a brick of a book, and none of us--seniors all--is considering joining the Jesuits anytime soon. 

Seems clear that James Martin, SJ (note the initials please), the cultural editor of America magazine, has garnered enough non-Jesuit readers with his blessed Jesuit Guide to have carved out a notch on the New York Times Bestseller list. Having read the Guide, I get it. He's affable, blessed with a winning way, and never ever takes himself too seriously, which doesn't mean his commitments aren't evident and deeply rooted. I liked the book greatly, not enough to sign up, but greatly. 

So yesterday, when we got together to talk about it, we asked ourselves just exactly what major differences existed between Roman Catholicism and our own particular pitch of old-time Calvinism. "Hierarchy," I said, "the whole pope thing, lord of all."

Someone else mentioned Mary, the rosary business, the immaculate conception, and all of that.

Others agreed, but none of us could remember reading much about the Holy Mother in The Jesuit Guide, so one of us flipped open the book to the index and announced that "Mary" wasn't even listed.

If she was not part of a 400-page book--complete with questions for discussions and a handy dandy guide to what's inside--her absence might help explain how it might be that a gaggle of guys who've been Christian Reformed for all or most of our lives could have enjoyed the book as much as we did.

More to the point, perhaps, is the character of spirituality Father Martin creates to define the Ignatian way, "a spirituality for real life," he calls it. 

It's not at all rare for him to venture into memoir when referencing his own life by way of experiences he judges to be helpful. At one point, he talks about the fact that his writing has given him some standing, some prominence in the community, which could translate into some arrogance. Hasn't, he says.

Overall, I'm happy that others find my writing helpful, especially since the work of a Jesuit is supposed to "help souls." The more people who read books about the spiritual life the more chance that at least a few more souls will be helped.

Read closely, Martin's use of the word help is as interesting as it is peculiar because, read by a Protestant like me, help is, at least, somewhat unexpected. Most of our evangelical friends wouldn't use the word he does. This is the way that last sentence would be rendered in evangelicaldom: "The more people who read books about the spiritual life the more chance that at least a few more souls will be saved." 

I don't know enough about the Jesuits to assert that Martin's choice of words is characteristic, but I do know that the spirituality he tries to document and to praise in this forthright guide is in no way over the top. "Being saved" is a big deal, but the phrase isn't in his lexicon. Help is. His is a spirituality I can live with. For me at least, that usage may well be a key to understanding why I found the book a good fit.

Asides are almost always rich. He puts some material into shaded boxes throughout, often signaling something light-hearted. One of those shadow boxes featured a long quote from a Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ (of course!), who at some moment in his era (1675-1751) penned this preciousness.

Those who have abandoned  themselves to God always lead mysterious lives and receive from God exceptional and miraculous gifts by means of the most ordinary, natural and chance experiences in which thee appears to be nothing unusual. The simplest sermons, the most banal conversations, the least erudite books become the source of knowledge and wisdom to these souls by virtue of go0d's purpose. This is why they carefully pick up the crumbs which clever minds tread underfoot, for to them everything is precious and a source of enrichment.

That's rich, isn't it? That's the kind of spirituality Father James Martin, SJ, is peddling in the The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything. That's why we liked it, I think. 

At least that's why I did.

Trouble in Chaco Canyon

Chaco Canyon is one of those places where what isn't there is just as fascinating as what is. What abounds is ruins, mostly, although calling them ruins suggests the place is a mess. It isn't. It's clean and ordered and administered by National Park employees who operate out of a new (2012) and helpful Visitor's Center.

Getting there isn't a problem really. You just drive forever over endless gravel and occasional jaw-rattling potholes, circle through high desert land people used to call "wasteland." It isn't. Not when there is oil to be drilled. I don't have to tell you gas is $3.29 @ gallon here right now, higher elsewhere, I'm sure. 

With the help of a Native American Secretary of the Interior, the first, I should add, President Biden recently declared 10-mile, 20-year moratorium on oil drilling in the area, even though he's facing angry voters.

The moratorium brought to mind and memory the way ex-President Trump dealt with Lakotas on the Standing Rock Reservation. He didn't tolerate their protests, not for a minute. In Trump's own inimitable way, he shut them down, put them in their place, white folks might say. "Drill, baby, drill," VP candidate Sarah Palin used to say. 

Not even a Native American Secretary of State could keep Biden afloat in turbulent waters--of which there are none anywhere near Chaco Canyon, by the way. Just yesterday, the Navaho nation weighed in somewhat angrily on Biden's ruling, and let the administration know that it was by no means happy.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute--let me get this straight," white folks might say. "Biden preserves Native history, and Native people turn on him? Am I missing something?"

Yes, probably. Native people are not monolithic. The culture they share is one for the most part destroyed by Euro-Americans, but particulars of that culture are not xeroxed. The Poncas are neither Lakota or Winnebago. They have their own story, as do the Lakota and the Winnebago. And Omaha. And Santee. 

In this case, the Navajo people, traditionally semi-nomadic sheep herders, are not carbon copies of the pueblo people; and both have a history in Chaco Canyon. The canyon's wondrous heritage is on Navajo reservation land today. 

What the Navajo nation argues is that the drill-free zone should be drawn just five miles around Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, not ten-miles, because Navajo land allotment owners are not happy being shut out of income rightfully theirs. By drawing a circle ten miles around the Park, Washington is depriving some Navajo people of an opportunity to make money. 

And what of Secretary Haaland, the Native Secretary of the Interior. Well, guess what?--she's from New Mexico herself, but her tribal affiliation is Laguna Pueblo, an entirely different nation. 

All of which makes white folks head spin and long for the days of Sarah Palin.

There are hard lessons here, but they're worth unravelling. First, Native America is not monolithic; Native people share problems, but are separate nations with separate histories. Second, Native people, like every last Euro- I know, are human, and thus as full of the dickens as anyone else. They're neither the savages we Euros thought them to be, nor are they saints. They're human.

Navajos want to be heard. There is something at stake here in a canyon as incredible a museum as you can find in D.C., something Navajos have a stake in. Like most every other American, for good or ill, dang it! when it affects their wallets especially, they want to be heard.

By the way, trust me--you ought to visit Chaco Canyon sometime.

Uncommon grace

 

We've got Oriental Poppies in the powder room. Hasn't always been there, of course--we've only been in the house for nine years. But we've had it--well, a print of the famous Georgia O'Keeffe painting--for quite a few decades of our married lives.

Bought it in Santa Fe, as I remember, where we spent a memorably passionate anniversary years and years ago, in what seems another age (and it was). Georgia O'Keeffe's life changed when an American artist named Albert Stieglitz, a man twenty years her senior spotted her work and featured it in his gallery. Stieglitz was a wonderful photographer, probably the most powerful "arteest" of his day. Being featured in his gallery was something a young teacher at West Texas State University could not have dreamed.

But it happened, and when it did, Georgia O'Keeffe's life changed dramatically. In the late years of the 19th century, Stieglitz was a leader among those who believed that the new technologies (well, the photograph) was surely as much an art form as anything done with an easel on canvas, as his photographs testified--like this one, "Weary."

Stieglitz was twenty years O'Keefe's senior, but he found the young, Texas art teacher impossible to forget, both her work and herself. And thus, as you can imagine, an affair began, Stieglitz being married with children. For a time, until his marriage ended, the young O'Keeffe became his mistress. During that crucial time--and longer, I suppose--Stieglitz could not let his lover alone. She must not have minded his camera because he took at least 300 pictures of her, pictures that, yet today, are memorably beautiful only because they speak volumes of his deep infatuation. Pictures like this

and this.

When Stieglitz dallied with another woman in New York, Georgia O'Keeffe decided to leave for New Mexico. The favor her husband once showed her when he featured his work in his gallery was an immense blessing for her work; but a far greater moment in her artistic life occurred when Georgia O'Keeffe's moved to New Mexico, where what she put on her canvas blossomed in the indescribable colors of the desert Southwest. New Mexico's breathtaking landscape loved Georgia O'Keeffe, and that passion was clearly mutual. Our Oriental Poppies is just one of those paintings.

Here's another. 

Georgia O'Keeffe had never seen anything like the world she now lived in and adored. She told her friends this was her country and stayed. She and Stieglitz had stormy moments thereafter, but she rarely withheld her favors and was, I suppose we'd say today, quite openly bisexual. Just as he hadn't, she didn't stay within what people call "the bounds of marriage." 

Meanwhile, she kept painting.

There's something almost eerily human about her New Mexico landscapes. They greet the eyes and heart somehow, in part because they don't seem at all inanimate. New Mexico fundamentally changed Georgia O'Keeffe in ways Alfred Stieglitz never did or could. 

I don't know if the Dordt College of the mid- to late-Sixties ever formulated it as a behavioral objective of its curriculum back then, but one of the most liberating truths I learned as an undergraduate at a college in the staid Calvinistic/Reformed tradition was, well, common grace--to be specific in this case, how a woman like Georgia O'Keefe, despite breaking every moral dictum that came with "the Christian life" as I heard that phrase used in my boyhood, how a Georgia O'Keeffe was a wonderful gift to all of us because the beauty she could render on a canvas was something that clearly and evidently glorified the Creator. 

We've got a Georgia O'Keefe print, have had it for years. Bought it, I believe, in Santa Fe, at the Georgia O'Keefe museum. That whole story I just outlined isn't the reason why we bought it or why it still hangs in our house. The reason it does is because, my word, it's just plain beautiful. 

Yesterday was her birthday. Reason enough for morning thanks. 

Respecting mystery

What I remember her telling me about those mid-Depression days was how her father used to sit at the family table at night and shed very real tears. She was a teenager, as sensitive as teenagers are; but then, remembering her father's tears didn't require hyper-sensitivity.

It was spring, I suppose. Grandpa was the town blacksmith. Once upon a time we had a picture of him and his son, my uncle, in the shop. What I remember is horseshoes hanging from countless nails pounded in the ceiling beams, horseshoes that belonged to local farmers. 

Had to be spring because those supper-hour tears were about plowshares, sharpening them, as he likely did up until they were needed by the farmers who brought them in months earlier. Had to be spring, when those shares would get picked up, paid for. 

The tears fell from unpaid bills, farmers--just about all of them--who couldn't pay for work he'd finished. They had no money, no one did.

Which meant he didn't either. What he had was an ounce or two of hope, the belief--he was a pious man--that things would get better, that he couldn't get water when there was nothing in the well. But he couldn't keep the shares because the only hope for any of them was good crops come fall. So, my mother said, he worked for nothing. The Dirkse family was poor as the farmers he served. Grandpa's piety didn't outweigh the peril of his pennilessness. That's what she remembered. That's what she told me. 

The picture at the top of this morning's post was posted on a Facebook website devoted to historic pictures of Oostburg, the town where Grandpa and Mom and I all grew up. The woman who posted it claimed one of the actors that year was Jean Dirkse. . .my Mom. For the life of me I can't pick her out, but that she'd be in it makes all kinds of sense. Even though in later years she was prone towards depression, a part of her simply could not turn down a good time. Let me bring it up closer.

Huge cast it was too. When they gathered for the portrait, someone must have told a joke or two, made some smart-ass remark maybe, pulled a stunt that had them rolling. Clearly, they're all having a whale of a time on stage at the town hall, which has been itself gone for 60 years or more.

In fact, that huge cast is also gone--every last face in this darling portrait. All of the glee, the exuberance, the life, is no more. No human being I know could deliver a list of names.

Years ago, we had a cheerleading megaphone tucked away in an upstairs closet. I wish I could remember the colors, but what I'll not forget is the initials "OHS" across its flank. It was Mom's. She was a cheerleader for the basketball team. I loved it because it told me a tale about my mother when she was a teenager. Not much, really, but something.

One of the bite-sized morsels of moral truth we somehow learn and never forget is something Lew Smedes wrote in Mere Morality (1983), a compendium of practical advice. One of the issues he talked about is what to do when adult children profoundly disagree with aging parents, the kind of dissolution that happened altogether too frquently and did in my family during the Vietnam War. How do those who would follow Jesus deal with that level of family conflict?

His advice hit home. "Respect your parents' mystery," Smedes wrote. I can't quote him exactly, but the effect of his encouragement was that adult children like me respect the fact that tears at a supper table, a cheerleading megaphone, and the goofy portrait of a play cast, circa 1934, doesn't tell you everything. You don't know what factors played a role in Mom or Dad's development and upbringing, Smedes told me, as if he were right there beside me. You don't know their comings in and goings forth. You don't know what they never told you or even never told each other. 

Respecting your parents' mystery meant accepting the fact that you don't know much at all, honestly, about what shaped them into becoming who they were to you.

You can't help but love this picture. It catches the cast in sheer glee, a bunch of kids full of optimism and joy and the dynamo of excitement that adolescence creates in all of us. 

Years and years ago, my mom, deceased now for a decade, gathered on the town hall stage for a portrait of the cast of the OHS play. She was in it, and, goodness sakes', did they have fun.

That's all I know, all I'll ever know. 

You just can't help but smile.

Understanding

“Great is our Lord and mighty in power; 

his understanding has no limit.” Psalm 147:5

I just emptied my trash. There were 300 old e-mails packed therein, and, with nothing more than a key-stroke, they’re history, the words simply gone, as if they’d never existed.

Where do they go?—that’s what I’m wondering. Isn’t there some law of physics that matter simply doesn’t disappear? I suppose those 300 email notes had no matter; they were nothing but electronic impulses of some kind. But even if they had no matter, they held matter. I’m sure that sometime in the next few days I’ll remember something I should have done, go to the trash file to find some tossed note, and discover it and the horse it rode in on, gone. At one time, they mattered.

But they’ve vanished, never to be seen again. Strange.

An old friend called last night. He said his wife, who’s been fighting depression for years, has switched meds. “A scary time,” he told us, and I understand. What I don’t understand is how a pill can actually change character, alter personality, replace the dynamo of whatever it is that makes us each who we are. That’s scary. But it happens, and it happens all the time.

And why is it that I feel so much, of late, that I’d rather be alone than in the blessed company of other people. Once we were social. Once we looked forward to weekends because they meant games and gatherings. I still look forward to weekends, but the only frivolity I seek is peace and quiet and solitude. If the skies are clear, the dawn compels on Saturday morning. But I go alone. That’s the way I like it. Why?

Or this. Yesterday in a crowded shopping mall I read a short story from a new collection, read it almost straight though. I was sitting on a bench near the food court, at the very heart of things. Thousands of people passed me by. I saw few. It was a great story. I loved it. But I told myself that something had changed in me. Ten years ago—certainly twenty—I could not have sat there amid the thronging shoppers and focused so intensely on a single short story. What has changed in me, and why?

There’s so much I don’t understand.

Why do we suffer—honestly? The older I become, the more Job appears, just off my shoulder, one hand raised to heaven in a fist. Three of my friends are dying of cancer; all of them would love to live. None of them are ancient. Yet, all over North America people are building nursing homes to tend the millions who would, any day of the week, volunteer tomorrow for a long-sought trip to glory.

I was born after the Second World War, but I’ve spent more time reading the literature of the Holocaust than perhaps I should have. Arbeit Macht Frei—there’s a sign in my mind that will never leave. I know where Dr. Mengele stood right there at the platform as the trains rolled into Auschwitz. I can see his hand determining. "This way, showers—that way, work."  And even though I wasn’t there, I can hear millions of bootless cries to heaven.

I don’t understand about life and about death, about suffering and joy. There's just so much mystery.

And the greatest mystery of all is a gift, a sumptuous gift. I don’t know why his grace comes to me, but I believe that even though I don't understand, even though this flesh will surely corrupt and I will die, all that mystery about what it is we go through, He knows. Unlike mine, His understanding has no limits. 

Bless his holy name.

A story of November 11

Just as most of those upfront are in war, Jacob Van Veldhuizen seemed largely oblivious to the designs the brass were creating to end the carnage. What he knew was what he was told to do, what was pounding him in the moment. Given the trenches all around, just keeping a grip on his sanity required about everything his mind and soul and heart could muster. 

He was a grunt in the Great War, although it would take a half a century for that word to be coined. He was a young man of limited means and little or no education jerked out of the nation's heartland, a farm boy, but not a kid really--26 years old--a grunt without whom there would have been no battle at Meuse River in that decisive fall of 1918, a huge battle that began just months after American troops entered the war and weeks before the "war to end all wars" finally ended.

He would have called Newkirk home, rural Sioux County. He was the son of a farming family--mother, father, three sisters and a brother. Religiously, his eulogy says, "he practiced his belief with a sincere walk." There was no reason to believe he was anything but a good man, a religious man, a church goer. 

Jacob Van Veldhuizen wrote out a summary of his time at war, a little seven-page journal whose tense and brutal prose suggests he was a man far more at home with a hay fork than with pen or pencil. Listen. There is no punctuation. His tour of duty is one long sentence.

Then we left the rest camp and rode about 2 days on the train and then walked a little ways and arrived in Fruitcord and stayed there a little while and then Fruitcord and arrived Melville and stayed there about 2 weeks and there is were we got our gas masks and the drilled there and then left Melville and rode on trucks and arrived a Rariegate and there we stayed about a month and there is where we got our 6 weeks training going back and forth to the trenches we left Perilgot the 7th of August and went to Apillie Hill and there we went over the top [on] the 9th of Aug that was my first time and stayed there about 16 days then we went on the train and went to Louisey and drilled there 2 weeks and then we left Lousey and rode all night on French truck and came in a rest camp and stayed there about 2 days and then went to dugouts at germanville and stayed there 11 days and the 26th of Sept we went over the top on the other side of dead mans hill and that was some noise to hear about 2400guns shot as fast as they could . . .

Misspellings are abundant. Don't mind them. There's still plenty of story, plenty more he leaves unsaid. 

There's more in the phrase "over the top" than meets the eye. Think of him sitting in the mud of a sturdily built trench maybe a few hundred yards from the place where the Krauts were doing the very same, machine guns loaded, rifles up. "Over the top" meant hearing the whistle from the company commander and pulling yourself up and out of what little safety the trench could afford in order to advance on the enemy pouring machine gun fire into your face the moment your helmet comes up over the edge, all of that scramble of fire amid the canon roar from what he says were a thousand guns. You can feel the brittle nature of things in the prose, can't you? For thousands of doughboys blessed to survive, the frame of mind came to be called "shell shock."

and then we stayed there in the front line a little over a week and then we went to some dugout a little ways back and sta there about 3 days and then we went to foreste woods and stayed there 2 days then we crossed the meuse river and went in the argone woods and there we had an awfull fight on the 18th of Oct we went over the top for the 3th time and stayed there about a week then we went back to dead mans hill and stayed there about 4 days then we went back to a rest camp of the man (?) of Eschetol, and then I took sick and went to the Hospital with Broncituss the 27th of Oct and went to base hospital 22 stayed there about a week then I went to a covalesent camp

What history tells us is that the Meuse–Argonne offensive was the last and biggest Allied offensive of World War I. It began on September 26, 1918 and ran all the way up to the Armistice on November 11. The most massive battle in US military history required the bloody, selfless contributions of 1.2 million American soldiers, an Iowa farm boy, Jacob Van Veldhuizen, among them. Whether he knew it or not at the time, Jacob was one of that battle's 350,000 casualties. Historians have come to believe the tally of Americans was made worse by their inexperience.

All of that is there in the heartbeat of his memories, isn't it? You can feel the injury. What did he know anyway?--very, very little. He'd only just arrived, never been any farther away from home than the Sioux City stockyards. When the war ended, many more succumbed to an influenza outbreak of something called "Spanish flu."

Jacob Van Veldhuizen made it back to home to Newkirk, back to the place he grew up, the house where he'd lived as a child, the farm he wanted to work. He returned from three trips going "over the hill," from crossing the Meuse River in the biggest battle American soldiers ever waged. He got back.

we landed the 23 of May in New York in camp mills and then the Red Cross gave us pies and cake and coffee the camp is a nice place you can buy anything what you want and on the 28 of May we were split up those that go to the different camps and the last dinner we had them we had pie and ice cream after we were split up we went to tents and the 29 we went on the train for Camp Dodge came through Holland Ohio the Red Cross gave us sandwich and milk did not have milk for a long time and so it tasted good at Elkhart, Ina the Red Cross gave us ice cream arrived in Camp Dodge the 31st of May and got discharged the 1st of June.

But that's not how the story ends. How and why he scribbled out this seven page summary is something no one knows, more than a century later. You wish, sometime, that he'd been a better speller, that he'd taken the time to describe what it felt like to be there, to be a part of the massive battle that finally settled things and sent those who survived back home on the ships on which they came. You wish he could or would tell you more.

But he didn't. What he left was a scribbled manuscript far more pointed about when he'd been where he was than it is about how and why. What we have is what his mother herself might have kept in her diary--"snow last night cold wind winter on its way."

Jacob Van Veldhuizen was discharged from the American armed forces on June 1, 1919 and went home to Newkirk, where he died on a Thursday evening in the home of his parents on the farm whose land he worked. It was Thursday, September 25, 117 days after his discharge. The war took him too. It's good to remember, as we did yesterday, that we do well not to forget Jacob and many thousands of others.

Jacob Van Veldhuizen is buried in the Newkirk Cemetery.