An offering

Some TV advertisements should simply disappear these days. What's happening in Ukraine right now makes them obscene--dream vacations on vast, empty beaches, romance in crystalline waters, exotic eateries, hideaways for lovemaking. I'm 100% brow-furrowed Calvinist on mammoth luxury liners, too. Just clear the decks. No more. 

Saturday Night Live has a long history of irreverence, but last week's opening stopped the show when a chorus of Ukrainian singers began a doleful "Prayer for Ukraine" that was absolutely stunning.  That table in front of the singers, you may have noticed, is set with votive candles spelling out Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital; but on either side stand bouquets of sunflowers, the national flower. SNL had it right. First things first.

Last night, thumbing through old files, I stumbled on a Saturday morning catch along the Little Sioux River in September of 2015, a dawn when sunflowers overflowed in an abundance I didn't know how to capture, too many maybe.

This morning there cannot be too many. I wish I'd taken the time to capture the best images I could, but what stopped my meandering last night was the sudden abundance of sunflowers, a harvest of hope. There can't possibly be too many. 

The lines of good and evil are only rarely so stark and plain. Putin is evil. He is the aggressor, and his reasoning is insane. Millions of perfectly innocent women and children have left their homes, and their husbands and uncles and brothers who are staying behind to fight a vastly out-weaponed enemy with no right to invade. 

For Ukraine, to begin the week, I offer these sunflowers, fresh-cut this morning in sunshine and hope. In the free world, we're all on our knees. 

The Lord bless you and keep you, 

make his face to shine upon you, 

and give you peace.

Sunday Morning Meds--Each and Every One*

“He determines the number of the stars 

and calls them each by name.” Psalm 147:4

Yesterday, as I was walking up the grand stairway at the college where I teach, some kid came racing out of the offices upstairs and literally flew, right past me, down the stairs and out the door, his feet a whirr. The way he took that staircase on was a show, I swear, incredibly artful, even shocking.

I stood there, halfway up, and realized not only that once upon a time I could do that too, but also that I can’t anymore. I stood there stunned, realizing that I felt the way my grandpa must have sometime in his life. But now, my grandpa is long gone and I am he.

I have a cold, and it’s nothing to shake a hanky at. It started way down in my lungs about a week ago, fetching a cough I’ve been battling since. Yesterday, enemy forces climbed up my windpipe and took my sinuses hostage. This morning I awoke with a mouthful of fine, dry sand.

We haven’t heard from our son in more than a week. We hope he’s doing well, all alone so far away. We pray he’ll find some friends, some folks with whom he can be at home. We want him in church. We’re not sure of much, and haven’t been for several years.

This, my 36th year of teaching, hasn’t started out with joy. For the first time in all those years, I believe I’d move if the right opportunity came up. But I’m nearly 60 so who on earth will invest in someone who’s barely going to be get into the parking lot before leaving for retirement? Makes me feel dismal.

I’m facing a ton of student papers today, but I have to get them read. I’ve had them far too long. My students have every right to roll their eyes when I come into class without them.

My wife’s cholesterol spiked. She never knew she had a problem until the good doctor called a week ago after reading her test. “You better start some pills,” he told her, wrote out the prescription. She’s been on them since.

Her mother’s life is precarious, and in many ways she’d rather be gone. She’s not morbid about it, nor deeply depressed, but has little sense of her own use on this wintering earth. She thinks she’s a burden. Last week there was a bout with an ambulance. She vows, never again.

There are probably more laments, if I would listen to the dark voices.

To imagine that God knows that whole laundry list is beyond belief. To believe he loves me despite my curmudgeonliness, my insistent listing of my own problems as first and foremost in the universe, is absurd. To imagine that somewhere in that computer mind of his he’s drawn a divine bead on just me is incomprehensible, not only because of long list my ills but even more so because millions and billions of mes populate this world of his.

But out here in the country, I’m sure I see the night sky better than most Americans. I know how countless many stars there are above—at least I know better than most city-dwellers.

The comfort of Psalm 147:4 is that he knows them all, every one, knows what’s happening in their air space. Our great joy is that “he calls them each by name.”

He knows our aches and pains—so many of them too.

That’s really unbelievable, isn’t it? Only by faith do I know I’m not just baying at the moon or whistling in the dark.

~*~*~*~*~

*from Sixty at Sixty.

The Bulge -- i

For a couple of days at least, I'd like to tell some tales I've picked up of WWII vets who were close but never touched at the Battle of the Bulge. Knowing their stories has helped me understand more about that battle and more about war. Right now, it seems that kind of war is not so very far away. 

                                                           ~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~

She gone to war on a whim, really, joined the corps because a doctor told her that she and her friend were young and unattached, and she'd never really been off the reservation--well, to Rapid City to nursing school, but not much farther. He told her she should go out there and see the world, so she enlisted because she got sick-and-tired of having to catch a ride with the mail man if she wanted to go anywhere other than the reservation hospital where she'd found a job after nursing school. She went to war, honestly, for adventure. "What did we know about war?" she asked rhetorically.

The fact is, she knew nothing. She was a Lakota woman, something she knew very well even if her friends didn't. It was clear to her that she was, well, unique among the other nurses shipped to Europe before D-Day, the only nurse in her bunch who could claim Native blood. Sometimes her friends--and they were friends, good friends--called her a princess because they liked thinking about her as an Indian princess. She felt no discrimination during the war. None. 

In late 1944, Hitler decided to gamble everything on a last-ditch effort to break the Allied lines sweeping through toward Berlin. Germany needed the port at Antwerp, so he sent tens of thousands of troops--some just boys--into the Argonne Forest in a frighteningly bloody military action the world would soon call "The Battle of the Bulge."

At a field hospital bigger than a football field, a series of tents, a fully equipped hospital that eventually served thousands of casualties, American GIs, her assignment was the very first tent, A-1. It was war, and together with her nurse friends they did nothing at all but work and sleep, tend the thousands who showed up from the battle lines.

Who knows for sure whether or not the Germans actually aimed a buzz bomb at that field hospital? Anything is possible in the fog of war, and Hitler did things that most of us would rank as far more malevolent, more atrocious. Whatever happened that night, a 25 wounded GIs were killed right there in the hospital, red crosses all around, when a German buzz bomb stopped its horrifying buzz and fell near a tent where the patients were sleeping. Buzz bombs whizzed by quite regularly, when Hitler flung them in a blitz at London and then at Antwerp.

Patients looking for buzz bombs

She wasn't right there. She was on duty, but the field hospital was big and rangy, and she didn't see the horror with her own eyes. On her way back to her tent, she met a friend, another nurse, who did, who was there, who literally picked up the pieces. "Don't go," her friend told her. "Just go get some sleep, Marcella," her friend said. It was a warning Marcella understood for what it was.

When she was 100 years old, Marcella still wondered whether she did the right thing by listening to that friend and not witnessing what her friend had said she was better off not seeing. 

~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~

Monday: more stories from the Bulge

War

At a moment like this, it's not a crime to think the worst. What Vladimir Putin has in mind with respect to the Ukraine, no one knows, not anyone in Washington and, in all likelihood, very, very few in Moscow. The grievance that gives him cause is entirely in his soul--he wants a Russia in size and power approximating the Soviet Union of decades ago. 

The only way to get there is to kill people, to take back the Ukraine, whose men and women and children want no part of his Soviet leadership. And so we wait, as we've waited for the last month or so, for something to drop, as it has with his pseudo-invasion of what he seems to determine is rightfully his, those areas of the Ukraine that are "Russian-speaking." He doesn't need a lie; he simply makes them up as he goes, as he has and as he will. His troops, remember, are "peacemakers."

I ran across some war sketches of Harvey Dunn this morning, the handsome chap at the top of the page, the South Dakota illustrator/artist, specifically chosen by the War Department during World War I to bring a sketch book to France and show the war to America. He did, sketched out hundreds of quickly drawn images and determined that, when he'd return, he'd turn them into real portraits of the horror he saw in war.

That dream didn't work out. Many remained unfinished. The good news is that they exist and can be celebrated; the bad news is they're awful--because war is. Who would possibly want one of these hanging from the walls of your home--no one. But then, who wants war? Putin and a few sidekicks.

Here are some of Harvey Dunn's war sketches. Right now, it just seems right to drag them out for study because this is where Putin is bringing all of us right now.

These sketches and paintings are a century old, but that doesn't mean they don't speak to this dark moment.

This is war. And if Putin has his way, this is us, even if a shot is never sounded on these shores. 

Just another cold February post

 

It's that time of year when there's no seriously good reason for living here. My phone sports its own cute digital thermometer--it's there 24/7, even if I don't want to know the temp. For the record, right now it's -8 degrees, and the wind chill is checking in at -27 (that's a revision--most of this post is from last February).

In fact, what seems chilliest about the world outside my window is that there is no wind. Let me repeat that because it sounds like falsehood: there is no wind. Out here in the Upper Midwest, this killer of a weather phenom isn't going away soon, and it's already overstayed its welcome. 

Yesterday, Sunday, we experienced one of the small blessings of such utterly horrible temperatures. We emptied the freezer, put all the provender outside, then let the thick frost melt away into a pan. Barbara cleaned the freezer up, plugged it back in, we shimmied the thing back into its corner, then retrieved the whole mess of frozen goods from the front porch (looked like a food drive outside of our place), and finished up, proving that such horridly cold weather is at least good for defrosting freezers.

But not much else. A good old bachelor named A. J. Boersma once told me that in the little farmhouse they lived in when he and his family immigrated to America--it was out in the hills near Fairview, SD--had no insulation to speak of, shingles just nailed to boards pounded into the studs. When he and his brothers would wake up on mornings like this one, they'd peek up from beneath a ton of blankets and check the nails in the ceiling to see how much frost hung on them. Frosted nails were their thermometer.

It's possible that the Omaha who might have lived here--and certainly did both farther north and farther south--found possible shelter in earth homes the Arikara taught them to build. The Yanktons just stoked up the fire in the tipi, I guess, and laid a half-ton more stones over the bottom edge of the buffalo hides their tipis used for siding.

Buffalo, of course, had no problem. I remember reading somewhere that in the horrible blizzard of the early 90s, North Dakota lost thousands of cattle to three-feet of snow and the extreme temps--and just one buffalo. Of course, bison pull on an extra layer or two (or three) of winter coats, and come factory-equipped with their own snow plows. Just don't worry about buffalo.

All the sensible retirees are playing "Up and Down the River" in the community room of their Florida trailer courts right now. Even shuffle board sounds good. It's so cold, even the buffalo are thinking seriously about Arizona. 

Just how close is it? So cold that mailmen fear for polar bears. . .that people get morning coffee on a stick. . .that old men fart in snowflakes. . .that cold cops turn tazers on each other. 

Look, no matter how to cut it or slice it or plow it, it's just freakin' cold. 

And that's why, this morning, I'm greatly thankful I'm not in the old Boersma house or even waking up beneath a buffalo robe. I'm just thankful for sweet, warm shelter--and, oh, yes, that the freezer's defrosted.

Buechner: The truth on lying

We read this last night after supper. It's from Frederick Buechner, who has been at the heart of our daily altar for some time now, a Buechner collection titled Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith.

What came up last night, a paragraph on "Truth," is relevant any time, but eerily so last night and yet this morning:

There is perhaps nothing that so marks us as human as the gift of speech. Who knows to what degree and in what ways animals have the power to communicate with each other, but to all appearances it is only a shadow of ours. By speaking, we can reveal the hiddenness of thought, we can express the subtlest as well as the most devastating of emotions, we can heal, we can make poems, we can pray. All of which is to say we can speak truth--the truth of what it is to be ourselves, to be with each other, to be in the world--and such speaking as that is close to what being human is all about. What makes lying an evil is not only that the world is deceived by it, but that we are dehumanized by it.

Russian troops have finally crossed the line in Ukraine. Why? Because, or so says Putin, they're sorely needed to protect Russian-speakers of the region, who've been suffering at the hands of radical Ukrainians, supposedly. Therefore, Putin calls his troops "peacemakers." 

Peacemakers. 

It's not only the troops, but the rest of us, from throughout the world, are "dehumanized" by falsehood.

I couldn't help thinking yesterday as the Russian leader rambled on about how it was that the Ukraine was somehow mystically part of God-given Russia, that maybe--just maybe--some of the horrific polarization we've suffered in the last five years, how maybe the royal gorge that separates us and inflicts damage on the national psyche might be somehow mitigated by any united effort we can forge to keep Putin from gorging himself on more land. He's a thug, a killer, a 21st century Stalin.

But Tucker Carlson seems bound and determined to dig the royal gorge even deeper. It might be overstated to claim he's established his support for Putin and the invading forces moving into the Ukraine right now, but, most certainly, Tucker has not condemned Putin's military action. 

Why not? Good question, but the millions of American minds he shapes every night will turn elsewhere Tucker Carlson is suddenly tamed into just another voice on America media. If Tucker condemns Putin, he loses his uniqueness, and his uniqueness--not the truth--is what Tucker Carlson is all about.

Tucker is not going anywhere, I suppose, because what's clear to him, to those who follow him, and even to those who, like me, would rather lick a February pump handle, is that he has to support--you know what?--THE BIG LIE.

"What makes lying an evil is not only that the world is deceived by it," Buechner says, "but that we are dehumanized by it."

All of us. 

Dehumanized.

Morning Thanks--Friends

It's not that I don't know, at least in part, the ever-present danger of "doom-scrolling." I've read enough of it to understand the violence social media can inflict. 

It's not that I don't understand that my own use of social media--which is significant, I might add--tallies facts about my life I'm not otherwise willing to give up, which is why some say of social media, "You're not the customer but the product being sold." I get that. I know that I'm "being served" to the crunching that goes on at Facebook or Twitter. 

I understand the fact that incredible logorythms deliberately make us horrified about something--some behavior, for instance--because we're already hard-wired, it seems, to react most eagerly to anger. I get it that manipulation is not only an effect but even the point of things.

I know something of the social shaming that goes on on-line aren't a flaw of social media but a built in facet of their design, the what-for of their very existence.

I've heard the Jeremiahs claim that the public are little more than "logs thrown on silicone valley's fires," and that the judgments we make before the many screens we've set up in in our homes not only determine how we use our "spare time," but come to affect, by their incredible power, how we behave even when we're not on-line. 

I'm listening to a book I heard about on NPR, Four Thousand Weeks (a clever way to talking about the span of our lives), in which Oliver Burkeman makes all-too-painfully clear that social media's power in our lives is not simply that it detracts us from what we might think of as more important matters, but comes to define, for us, what we consider "important matters."

I'm not blind. 

I'm old, but I'm still capable of listening to the those minor prophets of our time sound their endless "woe and woe and woe."

I know. I know. I know.

But when my birthday rolls around, it's social media that puts a lays a hand on my shoulder, smiles brightly, takes me out for lunch--honestly and truly.  My family's best wishes not withstanding, it's Facebook that has me shaking my head, not just for the sheer volume of "happy birthdays," but from the museum of my life all those good wishes build right before my eyes: old friends, new friends, facebook friends, ex-high school students, ex-college students, family (close and distant)--just about every last "happy birthday" flashes a story I can't help but remember.

The truth is, I don't need to die to have my life flash back before me--I just need a birthday. Facebook brings by a host of well-wishers, and I can spend half a day reminiscing. I know this: when you're scoring your 74th birthday, Facebook delivers a gift that's a blessing.

So this is to say "Thanks" for the hundreds of well-wishers I heard from on Friday. My birthday was a real treat, a joy. You made it so.

This morning, y'all are my morning thanks!

Sunday Morning Meds--Past Tense

“I cried out to God for help; 

I cried out to God to hear me.” Psalm 77:1

The kid was eighteen, in his last year of high school, the last month-and-a half really, and he was on his way to the state high school basketball tournament.

It was one of those accidents that could have happened a hundred miles away but didn’t. It happened on a non-descript, busy intersection people have passed for years on their way to work and never, ever noticed, an intersection minutes away from his home. The three of them were on the little trip to the state capital they’d just started, and just like that one of them was dead.

It makes a difference how, I suppose, but I’m glad I’m not the law because what kind of penalty could you exact that would be worse than what has already been given? The boy is dead, someone who, by all accounts, was a great kid, someone who, just days ago, had professed his faith in God publicly in his church. For the accident, someone else already has a life sentence.

The poet of Psalm 77 starts with history, repeated like a mantra. “Here are the facts, Lord. In the past, when I cried out to you for help, you answered. That’s what I know of your love. You were there when I needed you. My cries were never bootless, never empty.”

One of the reasons the shocking, accidental death of a kid a couple hundred miles away from the chair where I’m sitting is so frightful is that his friends likely have no such history. Kids generally can’t testify the way the poet does in Psalm 77. He can recite chapter and verse of earlier distress or horror. The sudden, inexplicable end of a life is shockingly new.

Yesterday, a friend of mine held forth in chapel about hairs falling from heads. He did a careful analysis of every such simile in scripture and showed—forcefully and convincingly—that the phrase itself, “not a hair can fall from your head,” is scriptural shorthand for life itself. He referred to specific tragedies suffered just recently in the community, even mentioned the loss of his own son, years ago; and then passionately offered this eternal bromide: God himself will never leave us, even in death.

He was speaking at just about the time some very tragic news was hitting a rural community in Minnesota—one of their own, a really good kid, was dead.

I never knew the kid. He’d decided to come to the college where I teach next year, but somewhere in a campus office this morning, his application will be filed elsewhere. If years were moments—and in an eternal way they are—he might have been in chapel yesterday to hear the powerful lesson about hairs falling.

The Apostle Paul says in Romans 5 that suffering builds perseverance, perseverance builds character, and character creates hope. It sounds so good at distance, or in a rearview mirror. It makes great sense if we’ve got a history.

But in rural Minnesota this morning there are hundreds crying, many of them kids. They’re losing some innocence and gaining a history. Maybe someday the words of the poet will be theirs just as surely as they were his: when I bawled, you wiped my tears—remember? But this morning they’re learning how life goes.

May the God of peace answer them, just as he’s answered the chapel speaker, as he’s answered me, as he answered the poet. Past tense.

Be there. That’s all the poet asks. And all I do too.

Born Again*

 

There's a cross in there somewhere

I remember doling out bucks to both of our kids before a week-long camping trip to the Black Hills years ago--spending money. I remember my daughter having little problem determining when and where to spend it, being a little too footloose, I thought, in dealing out the dough.

Not so my son, who never spent a dime. I remember standing with him at some South Dakota tourist trap and watching the conflict play out on his face: he was seriously considering buying some touristy thing, but he decided not to because back home there was something he wanted. He spent nothing the entire week, and simply pocketed the dough.

My daughter is hardly a spendthrift. She's inherited her mother's genetic inclination to make do with almost anything. She's not tight--that's not it at. She's just unAmerican: she simply doesn't see the need to buy when she doesn't have to.

In some ways, my son is no different--and even more so. But there was something else in his not spending bucks on useless souvenirs, some character attribute that has stuck with him for all of his years: he could be so deeply convicted to an idea that he was almost impervious to life around him, a very strong inner will.

When we look back, it seems clear to our kids' parents that some aspects of their unique characters were clearly manifest already in their childhoods. In some ways, we are who we will be, even as children.

Maybe it's a silly question, but what I'm wondering is what part being a Christian believer--or to use Christ's language--being "born again" plays in character. That people change when they undergo definitive spiritual experiences seems beyond question; they are "born again." Lame walk, blind see, drinkers dry up, the crooked go straight. Those things happen. If they didn't, religion would have zero appeal.

In a way, of course, what form of religion doesn't appear, at times, to make a great deal of difference. Last year, on the Rosebud Reservation, we were testimonied to by a recovering alcoholic whose song was an old one: "Once I was blind but now I can see, the light of the world is Jesus."

When he finished speaking, another Lakota took us to the sweat lodge out back of the mission, and basically preached the same sermon, albeit with different content: "Once I was blind (he too had been an alcoholic), but now I can see, the light of the world is Lakota religion." Both claimed life-changing spiritual experience, but different mediums.

I'm thinking about this, I suppose, because sometimes I wonder about individual differences between believers. If our testimony and our allegiance to God is pre-eminent in our lives, then why do individual differences even exist? If we all heartily swear to serve our master first of all, then why is there a man named Ron Sider and another named Pat Robertson? Jimmy Carter will go to his grave as the first American President to openly confess he was "born again." But, good night, the politics of Carter are absolutely nothing like the politics of Bush, who similarly confesses.

I remember Martin Marty saying somewhere that American Christians were deeply blessed by the simple fact that Billy Graham wasn't mean-spirited. If he were, the nature of evangelical Christianity today would be a whole lot different. [Long before Trump's legion of evangelicals.]

Or how about this? It turns out that Mother Theresa was plagued by spiritual doubt. I don't have a dime's worth of problems with her dark and meandering questions about God, but some Christians obviously do. Why? Some believers want their spiritual heroes clean and sanitized, as if anything less would be as disturbing as the notion that the baby Jesus had diaper rash. I don't. Why not?

Occasionally, skirmishes arise at the Christian college where I teach, skirmishes about what's "fitting" or "proper" for our students, skirmishes that almost always have something to do with full frontal nudity, or something akin--in film and art (used to be in literature too, but nobody reads anymore anyway). We bicker a bit--genially, I should add--and then, once again, life goes on. Whether or not this Christian college is on the road to perdition or Vanity Fair, whichever comes first, is yet to be determined; but differing opinions exist.

Where do those opinions come from?--the Bible? our professions? Our DNA? How can people who share the same creedal orientation disagree so deeply? Is has to be character, doesn't it? Are there identities in our physical constitutions that loom even bigger than our professions of faith?

If there is, then what does "born again" really mean?

I'm not frustrated, just fascinated. What am I really?

Wish I knew.

Some really do know--or think they do.

Not me.

Why is that?

I don't know. I really don't.

And that's okay.

Life wouldn't be quite so much fun if every last question was answerable.

___________________________ 

*This post is 15 years old, but I still like it, even though its burden predates the reign of Donald Trump, a reign which has altered discourse on this blog and in our national culture.

Respecting the mystery

Rev. Schaap and Mrs. Schaap (right) in 1915, with Professor and Mrs. Hemkes (left). 

It's difficult for me to imagine that anyone interested in genealogy could trace family stories back without finding a louse or two, men or women who didn't stay with the family program, despite DNA. I've always thought myself some strange hybrid of two great-grandfathers, one of whom, a salesman couldn't pass a roadside tavern without a drink. The other was a esteemed and crusty seminary professor (see above). I'm a half-breed, a little good cop, a little bad cop.

I can't help thinking it would be hard to believe anybody with Dutch Reformed blood wouldn't have at least one Pharisaical great-grandparent, someone armed with hair-trigger judgment in unenduring self-righteousness.

I don't know that my grandpa Schaap (whose birthday was yesterday and mine is today) was anything like that. I witnessed a little fight at a family reunion once upon a time, when the children--then in their seventies--talked about their father, the preacher, and disagreed, one uncle and one aunt claiming he operated with too much rigid legalism, the others claiming they remembered no such thing. Grandpa Schaap the preacher (see above) died when I was little shaver, leaving me only three specific memories--how he told the same jokes over and over again, how his house slippers swished over the kitchen floor behind me, and how he let me have it when I wasted water by letting it run from the faucet, waiting for it to cool.

I admit it. When I read the story I told yesterday, I was embarrassed. I'd not thought of him as some kind of firebrand, but the assault her church did on their union girl, Beatrice Phillips (she was barely "of age") imputed to me, a Dutch Calvinist, a bit of a Nazi legacy. What that consistory did was reprehensible. 

There might have been extenuating circumstances. Maybe her union involvement kept her away from church, thus avoiding the bread and wine, the means of grace. Maybe she whacked a scab or two when a newsman was there to record it. Maybe she'd long ago closed the door, even though her name stayed on the books. I'd like to excuse what he did when his consistory booted Beatrice Phillips, but I won't try, won't make excuses I can only fabricate anyway. 

And I'd just as soon avoid letting Fox News accuse me of cancel culture. The fact is, Third Kalamazoo CRC, its dominie, my grandpa, and his consistory, had little tolerance for labor unions, thought them thugs, believed union bosses chased scabs and beat on 'em. I'm sure my grandpa thought their deportment an embarrassment and a sacrilege.

What's more the old Calvinists, I'm sure, were all about "good order." If what went on gave even a whiff of the French Revolution, it was evil because that was chaos, and to a church full of Dutch Calvinists, disorder was flatly intolerable. Unions turned the world of work upside down, gave power to the working stiffs instead of their bosses. Chaos was a madness worse than injustice. "Don't get enough pay you say? Vote with your feet."

Odd that I remember something my dad told me years ago, probably when he was loving our children. "Grandpa used to say," he told me--speaking of his father--"that finally you'd know what kind of father you were by the kind of grandchildren your own children rear." 

That being said, I hope Rev. John C. Schaap, Minister of the Word and sacraments at Third Kalamazoo CRC, his third charge, would be proud of me, his grandson, even if our politics are worlds apart. 

I wouldn't doubt the action of his consistory in the Beatrice Phillips matter wasn't far afield from action any other CRC would have taken at the time, but I'm embarrassed by what they did back then. I am. Showing that young woman the door was reprehensible, an evil all its own. 

Lewis Smedes once recommended that adult children who find it difficult to abide their aging parents' views should learn to hold their tongues and "respect their parents' mystery," because none of us are all-knowing, all of us learn--and how exactly we do is not the privilege of others to know or understand fully.

When Mom and Dad act the way they do, they do so out of a long story their children only know in shadowy part. Just respect their mystery, Smedes said. 

Strikes me as sage advice.   

"Chasing scabs"

The news-worthiness of the story is the difficulty of a young woman's significant choice--church or union. Then again, for her the question was not so much a choice as a position the church had pushed her to when it posed that question: what will it be, Miss Beatrice Phillips (who was barely "of age," just 18 years old)--your membership here in Third Kalamazoo Christian Reformed Church, or your membership in the labor union that had stuck a local company that made corsets--yes, the female variety. The consistory, decisively, made their position clear.

Beatrice Phillips lost her job at the factory because she'd likely made no particular secret of joining the union. When the strike at the corset factory ended, she was fired for being an active member of the union. Working conditions at the factory were less than humane, she said, so she joined the strikers, "working to better those conditions and for the uplift of humanity in every way," or thus she explained it in a letter to the church consistory, a letter that detailed her determination to walk away from the church where she'd been raised.

After her firing from the factory, she traveled to Iowa and began working for the union at factories related to the Kalamazoo company where she'd got the pink slip. That's when the church sent her a letter detailing the church's criticism of her work. 

The consistory. . .has been informed that you are in Davenport, Iowa, working on behalf of a union to interfere with the work of a company that is doing or attempting to do business in that city. We have heard that the nature of your work is such that it may be called "chasing scabs." If such is the case, we, the consistory, feel that is our duty to warn you and kindly ask you to cease it. It will be for your own benefit if you do so.

They added this:

You must not forget that you are a member of this church and you must let your light shine before men to glorify God who is in heaven.

Apparently, to the consistory at least, working for a striking union was not "letting your life shine before men." Faced with the choice Third Kalamazoo had created, Beatrice Phillips walked out of the church. "You undoubtedly know," she wrote them, "that the factory's working conditions were horrible." And more:

I am not working in this union for myself alone, but for the wage slaves in this factory and many more. For what benefits one will always benefit others in time, as we are uniting to better conditions and we are progressing in spite of some people who are working for our downfall. 

With that she was out of the church and in with the union. 

I do not want you to think that I am disgusted with religion, for my belief in Christianity is the same. And I intend to live as good a life as I know how to life, but I am disgusted by the tactics they are using in that church, therefore I cannot be a member.

The original "cease and desist" letter from the consistory is signed by "J. C. Schaap (Minister)." 

The year was 1911. J. C. Schaap is/was my grandfather.

I'll have more to say tomorrow.

______________________________ 

You can find the story here-- https://scontent.fdsm1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/273010111_669739877796835_3965204844466307832_n.jpg?_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-5&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=xw6uF0xGzLoAX-oc8an&_nc_ht=scontent.fdsm1-1.fna&oh=00_AT9oUDkwnoWxybH48WicYxKb1uoAWMVC3OkQ-lBKch0gCA&oe=6212C5A6 

Just boys

Honestly, I don't want to get disagreeable. I may be feeling this way, as if I'm on a track toward irascibility, given that Friday is my birthday. This bit of psychic depression graying the world may just be a temporary thing, a phase, a moment in time. Once I've passed it--my birthday, I mean--I'll be fit to live once again in the real world. It may just be a birthday--for me, 74th.

But I doubt it. It's more. 

Last week I lost a roommate. I may have lost others I don't know about, but this one was a relative and friend, my mother's first cousin, even though an entire generation separated the two of them. He was far closer to my age. 

In his youth he was a star athlete, a talented sprinter who once, almost entirely on his own, just about won the state track meet having taken first in two hurdle events, high and low. Oostburg High School lost that state meet by a half point.

He sort of got me my first job, let me know that the state park down by the lake needed help, the park where he'd worked the previous summer. It was a great job, even though, back then, it meant cleaning more pit toilets than any human being should in a single lifetime. You rarely did the same thing two days in a row, and the gang of workers were almost always outside, almost always on the beach or close. The tasks may have been disagreeable--raking up whole schools of dead ale-wives every other morning for a while--but the job never was. Everything was outdoors and on the lakeshore.

"Everything tastes better outside," the boss used to say when we ate the lunches we'd packed together. He was a Korean War vet with a big, jovial personality, a man who rarely got angry and loved to stay around after work for a cold beer from the ancient refrigerator in the office basement, generally confiscated Pabst Blue Ribbon or Schlitz or Kingsburys, the bounty we collected from underage drinkers hamming it up in the park. 

This friend of mine who died, he didn't really join in that festive hour after work. It wasn't his thing to slug down a cold beer or two before going home. It hadn't been mine either before I took that job, but I didn't stay away from that fridge in the basement and learned, thereby, to be a little less Dutch Reformed.

He asked me if I'd like to room with him when he returned and I went to college. He was a junior; I was a freshman. I was leaving a girlfriend, he was taking his with. If they weren't yet engaged, they were certainly on that flowery path. The two of us slept in the same room, but weren't in the same classes, nor did we find the same table in the commons. He attended chapel religiously. I did what I could to hide away.

I smoked a little, but then most everybody did. He didn't. Wouldn't. I remember hiding my Kents, kind of, in my desk drawer; but he wasn't my mother and never tried to be, only got testy about my conduct once, when an elaborate prank got out of hand and just about sent a innocent kid into shock. "Now you've gone too far," he said, a bit angrily. It's amazing that I remember those words. Not amazing, however, that those words suggest an assessment of my behavior that was growing throughout the semester. I don't remember his otherwise trying to discipline his trying roomie, but he must have thought about it--"Now you've gone too far."

He loved science. I was beginning a lifelong affair with literature and art. He was driven. I was a wanderer. He knew exactly where life's journey would take him. With every passing week, I was less sure about what I'd been told was Truth. It was the 1960s; I grew increasingly anti-war. He was consumed by his studies, his lab work, his girlfriend. To this day, I don't know how he escaped the draft.

For years, I'd seen him when we'd visit the town we both called home. He moved back. I didn't. But I'd see him in church--them, his wife and their growing family. He grew into a devoted environmentalist, turned his own property into a haven, a sanctuary, a woodland retreat. For many years he taught in the local Christian school and led discussions outside the classroom. He was a believer, sometimes a true believer. 

He became deeply committed about the evils of evolution, touted, in fact, a six-day creation, wrote letters and articles criticizing those followers of Jesus who were not as faithful or devoted. He came to the college where I taught (and we'd attended) to quiz the profs who would be his kids' teachers because he wanted to know where they stood with regards to Darwin. He was orthodox. Wanted to make sure Dordt College was safe. 

It was not difficult for me to assume, later in our lives, that he saw me as a kind of opponent, someone who didn't live by his strenuous orthodoxy. But we always spoke kindly to each other, just as we had while cleaning toilets and picking up dead fish so many years before. We were always friends and relatives. He and his wife and family were kind and generous with their hospitality.

As a boy, he'd lived out in the country, closer to the lake than I did. When I was old enough to pedal my way down to the beach, by chance we used to meet there, a mile south of "straight down," near the boat club, not far from where my mother sometimes picked up fish when I was just a little shaver. 

Fishing was done, and the lakeshore was a playground back then. Only a few of the homes that now line the beach were there, so on a gorgeous summer day we'd have most of that wild world to ourselves, no one chasing us away. I don't know that it happened often, but once when my friends and I happened to be down there, as he was, we found a fairly hefty piece of driftwood lined with protruding nails.

It was one of those few days when Lake Michigan water happened to be warm--there weren't many. We were kids, a year or two too young to bale hay. It was perfect weather to be down there, a long, long ways from the pointed steeple of the church we both attended in town. 

I don't know whose idea it was, but I'm tempted to say it must have been his because, at that time at least, I lived in his shadow--he was, after all, two years farther along on the road to becoming a man. He sprouted hair where could I only dream of. I was, at best, pudgy; he already had the fitness he never lost. It wouldn't have been my idea to lug that driftwood log out into the water the way we did, then strip down to nothing at all and tie the strings of our swimming suits to that floating barge. He was the leader of the pack.

That floating long boat meant we could skinny dip all afternoon without having to leave our suits on shore or worry about getting in and out.  And it was grand, as skinny dipping always is. It was a moment in time, maybe four or five boys suddenly and warmly conscious of a joyful sexuality we were only beginning to understand and, well, tolerate. 

His death last week reminded me of so much that was conjoined in our lives and what was not. We worked together, lived together, worshipped together, sang together, played ball together, and sometimes, down by the beach, played together. 

We were friends, just friends, and the world I live in is no longer quite the same now that he's gone. We weren't buddies, save for a day or two on Lake Michigan, somewhere around the Boat Club, when we spent most of the afternoon in the cool, breaking surf, our swimsuits tied securely to a raft that floated beside us. Just kids. Just boys.

Makes me smile, that memory does, and that's a good thing, this week especially. It's a good, good thing.

The Pikes of Captain John Brown

Don't worry--they're facsimiles, not the real thing. Tons of these things--pikes, real ones--still exist because John Brown, abolitionist John Brown, ordered 900 of them, 900 pikes. They were intended to be an instrument of war, a formidable weapon. Brown somehow assumed that if he'd covertly spread them around among Southern slave families, pikes could become a bloody defense against weapons slave-holders created for subjugation. Why pretty it up with a word like subjugation?--a pike, Brown thought, would mitigate the whips, the leg-irons, the chains of slavery, the pure evil of slavery.

Charles Blair, a Connecticut forge master, told John Brown he could turn out a bunch for a dollar a pike. Brown, historians say, didn't hesitate for a minute. At a buck a shot he must have smelled a bargain. That he didn't have the money was not a consideration for him; he was, after all, called by Creator of Heaven and Earth to free the slaves, an dangerous role to be sure, but considering the source of his inspiration, no particular burden. "Make me 900," Brown must have said, which explains why, today, the honest-to-goodness John Brown pikes aren't exactly rare. Exactly how many of the 900 he ordered are still around, I don't know; but unlike Brown himself, his pikes never quite made it to war. 

Because there was wholesale men on the battlefield, because there were a score of casualties and some death, because the battle pitted partisans from both sides of the issue of slavery, what happened at Black Jack, Kansas, in 1856 is often considered the very first battle of the Civil War, the Civil War. The pro-slavery "border ruffians" were led by Charles Pate, who brought his Bowie knife to the action and gave it up, in a gentlemanly fashion, to John Brown, once the smoke cleared. 

Brown liked it, a battle trophy, but he wasn't alone. The Bowie knife, a title whose specifics varied widely back then and still do. The Bowie knife got its name from Jim Bowie, one of those Davy-Crockett types whose name and regard and big knife grew into legend. A Bowie knife, even back then, was simply a BIG knife--a double-edged, cross hilted, clip-pointed weapon, a real toad-stabber you wore at your side or slid from your boot. For a time in American history, the Bowie knife was so popular that Southern gentlemen, even some from the U. S. House and Senate, made sure there was one in their boots, if you can imagine.

They were menacing things, their horror created by their immensity. Charles Pate's Bowie ended up in the hands of John Brown. Having one apparently put him in mind of what might be done on Southern plantations should he get them, wooden handled, to slave families. Even though swords as weapons of war had lost their importance by the early 19th century, Brown was greatly taken by the idea of pikes slicing up slave-holders, creating bloody scenes that would certainly hurry along the whole movement to free the slaves.

"How about this?" he must have said to himself. "How about we put them on six-foot wooden poles?" Mr. Charles Blair must have said he could do that, and did. Hence, the John Brown pikes, many of them in museums yet today.

You may have noticed the white whale behind the image of John Brown above. It's hard not to think of Melville's Captain Ahab as a Brown-type figure, someone so obsessed with his mission as to be totally unable to separate himself from the urgency. Monomania, some call it. Then again, some say it was insanity. 

But Brown wouldn't let anyone call what went down at Harpers Ferry insanity. At his trial, some abolitionists wanted him to plead that way and thereby save himself from the noose. He refused. To him, his God-ordained, moral crusade was anything but insane. And he was hanged for it.

Credit him or bury him with this: he put everything, even his family, even his children, on the line for work he believed the Lord of heaven and earth called him personally to, to free the slaves. 

Paragon of virtue or hideous, insane zealot, John Brown may be a character in American history whose profile will never, ever fade into obscurity.

There's still a lot of pikes around.

Frettin'*

 

“Do not fret because of evil men . . .” Psalm 37:1

My mother, who is gloriously upbeat in many ways, tells me she thinks the world is sinking toward some black hole that will suck most all of us in, until the Lord, in glory, comes again. She frets about some of our culture’s seamy edges, and her continual frettin’ affects her mood. She listens to too many radio talk show hosts.

She’s old enough to deserve my respect no matter what her views or how much she frets; besides, she’s my mother. But I’m not taken by the way she flirts with darkness because I don’t think she should spend the last years of her life frettin’ the way she does.

We live in strange times. I don’t think it’s possible to locate an era in the last century or more when spirituality was ever quite so popular. Most Americans claim to believe in God. A significant majority go to worship frequently. Crime has been down, as is drug use, as is teen-age pregnancy. Even abortion rates are lower than they were.

Just about every college student I know wears a T-shirt with a Bible verse. Students flock to praise-n-worship gatherings voluntarily and exude a piety that existed only among the most devout kids just twenty years ago. Lots of parents tell me their kids are far more spiritually mature at 18 than they themselves were at that age. Most of them go on church work groups or missions, many of them to the poorest regions of the world. Where I live, faith is almost hip.

For the last few years, the U. S. government has been in the hands of Bible-totin’ Republicans, my mother’s party. Many politicos and pundits claim the 2004 Presidential election was a wake-up call to many opinion-leaders who never took Christians seriously. Most major newspapers now concede that for too long they didn’t have a clue about a huge segment of the populace—evangelicals. Today, the media features stories about faith.

It’s difficult to argue that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, although Mom thinks so. What troubles her is that this Christian nation is becoming secular, forbidding prayer and tolerating abortion, tossing the Ten Commandments.

I think she’s frettin’ way too much. She thinks I’m far worse off—a liberal.

In the world where I live, wind storms, “dusters,” got so thick and black in the Thirties they killed people. When a big one blew up in Oklahoma or Kansas or western Nebraska, when things got really dark in the middle of the day and wet blankets or sealed up windows couldn’t keep dirt out of the house, good Christians thought it was, quite literally, the end of the world.

A host of believers I know plot out the trajectory of the times in the same direction—today things are just getting worse and worse and worse. . .

Maybe I just don’t fret enough. Maybe I will in a few years. Maybe it’s another sign of aging.

I know this—both Mom and I can take heart from verse one of Psalm 37, which says, in a nutshell, “don’t do that.” The enemies—whoever they are—aren’t worth my time or anxiety, nor are they worth hers: don’t fret ‘em away.

Next week I’ll quote that verse to her. Maybe it will help.

Probably not. She’ll still think I’m a liberal.

________________________

*I don't think I need to say that this one isn't new :). Mom's gone, Trump's not, and but I have to confess that I'm still a liberal. For the record, she wasn't fond of this one.

Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not so far away.

Maybe it was Maus, the declaration of some Tennessee school board that a book I think the world of was off-limits for high school readers and classes. The board's justification made clear that none of its members were saying that the Maus was a bad book. It was just too bad for the district's kids. 

That idiocy brought back a time in my life when our school administration made my colleagues and me create a handout for our students to bring home to their parents, a notification that their children would be viewing and reading material that was particularly graphic. Greenway High School's administration thought it prudent to alert parents that their English teachers would be showing photographs that documented "man's inhumanity to man." Why? Some photos showed naked bodies.

It seemed somehow incongruous that we would ask parental permission to show full frontal nudity, when our motivation was to demonstrate just exactly how inhuman humanity could be, and was just 30 years before. My team-teacher was Jewish and proud--and angry. But we sent the note home. 

But to ban Maus from the curriculum seemed not only draconian but downright Nazi-like. Look for yourself. It's not particularly difficult to find photographs of German people, pre-war, burning books. Should some books be kept from the eyes of children?--of course. But Maus? It felt to me like a book-burning.

When I heard about the Auschwitz exhibition coming to Kansas City, one of only fourteen places in the world, I wanted to go--and did, last week. That's why what's behind me here is a week full of posts on the Holocaust. For a time in my life I thought I'd seen enough. One woman, responding to exhibition pictures I put up on Facebook, announced that one of her boys, after seeing pictures from any of a dozen concentration camps, promptly threw up. I know the feeling. I thought I was almost there when I read (and taught) a book a week in 1995.

But I also remember watching Diet Eman age. She was marvelously talented as a speaker, not because she was an artist with words, not because she knew how to fashion a narrative, but because she was so earnestly driven to tell the story, her story, an earnestness that grew from her commitment to make sure every last human being within the sound of her voice knew and understood that Holocaust wasn't some phony business. It happened. It didn't not happen, and she knew it happened because her fiancé, the only man she ever loved, the man she'd been engaged to before the blitzkrieg came to Holland, that man never returned from a labor camp named Dachau.

As she aged, she wasn't strong enough to continue to speak whenever requested--and the requests kept coming. Sometime in her eighties, she determined that she wouldn't speak to old people any more, only children because children didn't have the camps in their experience, only in their history books; and it was the young people, she used to tell me--they were the ones who needed to know, who needed to understand that what happened in the Netherlands and throughout occupied Europe must never, ever happen again. 

I ordered the exhibition book the night we returned from Kansas City, in all likelihood the first Holocaust book I'd purchased in years. And then, all week long, I've used this blog to return to a time in human history I once told myself I really don't care to revisit. 

But Diet Eman is gone now. You can hear her tell her story in dozens of YouTube videos, but that she's gone may be why I wanted to go back too, because she can't do what she committed herself to doing in 1990 or so, actually telling her story. She'd kept it bottled up in her for all those years, rarely mentioned it, let out little scenes from her resistance work in the Netherlands and a bit of her suffering, and then told me she'd realized one night in church that telling her children was something she had to do. 

So if you've been put off by five days of Auschwitz, I just thought I'd say I couldn't help myself. I experienced an exhibition that reminded me how ardent she was in making sure she did everything in her power to tell people it was real, the whole Holocaust horror wasn't a dream or a game or a façade. It was real. 

Have a look at that image at the top of the page. Just before the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz to the Russian troops, they tried to burn everything. They tried to burn down what they'd so meticulously engineered, but they couldn't erase what had gone on. Even what's burned tells the story.

The final scene at the Holocaust Museum in D. C., at least as I remember, is a series of videos of survivors telling their horrifying stories. Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away uses videos also at the end, videos that feature not the survivors but the victims in their lives before the Holocaust, a looping thread of home movies from 1935 or so, showing people enjoying life, having fun, swimming, gathering as families. Those home movies were projected on several walls so you couldn't really miss the joy, even though all those men and women and children--even babies--did.

And then this--

Family vacation

Most of the exhibits were described in the Dutch language, so we missed out on a lot. I didn't complain--then or now, thirty years later. I had known ahead of time what the memorial at Westerbork transit camp commemorated, even a bit of how the place operated and looked--especially these twisted prongs of a railroad track, meant thereby to memorialize what happened and to signify that death trains operate no more.

Westerbork was a station and a camp. Originally a place for displaced Jews escaping from Germany or wherever they felt suddenly conscious of being Jewish and at great risk. Westerbork was a refugee camp, a safe place.  

But two years after the German invasion of the Netherlands, two years after the occupation began, Westerbork was transitioned to something else altogether. The Nazi SS took the place over, and on July 15, 1942, a passenger train--eventually cattle cars--left these tracks for a place on the German/Poland border, a place called Auschwitz. More than 55,000 Dutch Jews would take that trip, most all of them never to return. 

Our family visited Westerbork in 1991. I'd taken on the job of helping a Holocaust survivor write her story, and I wanted to see for myself some of the places that were most important to her during the German Occupation, when she and her fiancé operated in great danger as members of the Dutch Resistance. One of those places, a final destination, was a camp close to the German border and far from major cities, a transit camp named Westerbork. 

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and even if the descriptions were written in the Dutch language, the experience of the place was stunning--well, chilling. No occupied country lost as high a percentage of its Jewish population during the war, as did the Netherlands. Almost 100,000 Jewish men, women, and children left Westerbork on a track to death. Pictures like this don't require description.

We must have been there in the morning because later that day, just outside of Arnhem, we stopped as planned at the Dutch National Open-Air Museum, a sprawling community all its own, full of Dutch history--barns and bridges, shops and open houses where docents, dressed in the clothing of their time, were working at tasks, like blacksmithing, long departed from everyday Holland.

We'd separated for some unknown reason--mom and daughter were off somewhere on their own, as were our son and I. Seems to me we were in some kind of general merchandise store, the kind of place that just about every burg in northwest Iowa had until the necessary horsepower came in gasoline engines. Seems to me the place looked like the Newkirk Store. 

The plump docent wore an all-encompassing apron and a beard, as I remember. His shirt looked much like what I'd seen on men at Tulip Festival. The two of us wandered slowly, didn't beg attention or conversation until he opened it up with a question that surprised me. "You're Dutch, aren't you?" he said, pointing a bit with a wave of his hand.

"Well, yes," I told him, "but we're fifth generation Dutch-American." I was amazed that he'd called me out the way he did--I don't think I was conscious of "looking" Dutch. 

"And your name?" he said.

"Skkkhhhaap," I said, trying my best to wiggle my epiglottis into creating that unique lingual marker.

"That right?" he said. "You're Jewish."

I shook my head. 

"Schaap, in Holland, is a Jewish name." 

He explained it this way. When Jewish people immigrated to the Netherlands--which they did and had done for hundreds of years, the Dutch being more permissive than other countries--they were accepted as citizens if they would jump two hurdles: first, join the Dutch Reformed Church; and second, take a Dutch name.  "In the Netherlands, Jewish people often have very simple names--like Schaap, from 'sheep,' or Van Rotterdam or Van Amsterdam."

I don't think my son had quite made it to middle school back then. He was just a kid, and I may well be creating a story that wasn't there. But when I looked at him just then, when the Dutchman in the old general store told me we were Jewish, something of the reality of the transit camp at Westerbork, something of its horror and its shame, something of all of that, I think I saw in his eyes.

Some family vacation moments are blessedly memorable. I hope that is true for him in the story in the Newkirk Store.