Holy Week*

 

1. He's a believer today, in great part, because once upon a time a missionary, a white man, convinced this believer's father to send his little boy off to school at a Christian mission, or so this believer told me. What his father told him later, when he grew older, was that he really didn't believe in the Christian religion--he was, after all, a deeply religious man; but he came to believe after a year or so of conversations with that missionary, many of them right there in the hogan and more just outside, that what the missionary and his people were peddling was basically the same message as Native religion, something quite akin to "the beauty way." 

His reasoning went something like this: what the white men will teach you isn't necessarily right, but it's good--and those who believe it at the Rehoboth mission are good; therefore what they teach may well bring you into "the beauty way," the way of love and respect.

So, decades ago, still a boy, he went off to the school at the mission. Today, he's a believer, a Christian.

2. We're walking around the village, strangers to be sure, two of us white and American in the middle of a busy Mali village of 500 souls, maybe more, in a rural area where most villages are little more than extended family compounds. Sheep and goats, chickens and dogs wander everywhere. In rural, sub-Saharan Africa, people sleep under roofs and within walls but generally live outside. 

We're walking along a street and passing the mosque--you can't miss it because it's kept up well by Khadafi's oil billions--when out walks the imam. Go ahead and imagine him. He looks exactly like you might think, bearded, capped, shawled, long and colorful robes. He stops us. We hadn't knocked or tried to sneak into the mosque. 

Out he comes. "Let me tell you about him," the imam says, and points at our tour guide, the head of the medical clinic just outside the village. The mullah came out to meet us because he needed to be sure we knew what a tremendous blessing this man, a Christian, has been to the whole village. May Allah be praised.

3. It's the house of the senator of the region, something like that. The political position doesn't really have an equivalent here, but in Niger he's the official representative of the national government; and we're there at his house, his compound, eating his food and drinking his bottled water because he's very proud to tell us that the man we're with, the man who, with his wife, has created a medical clinic in town, is a wonderful man who is doing great work. 

It's been a holiday, the Feast of Tabaski, and everywhere there are picnics, barbeques, family reunions. People are adorned in their finery, their most outlandish jewelry and brand new colorful dresses. It's a festival of biblical proportions. Everyone in the city, save just a few, is Muslim--everyone. As is the senator, his wife, the house guests who happen to be visiting when we drop by, the servants who bring us food and drink, and the armed military parked just outside his place. But the politician makes very sure we know that this Christian medical man is a great gift, even though he is, by definition, a heathen.

4. In a Sunday op-ed, Nicholas Kristof, who is not an evangelical, offers some remarkable testimony about evangelicals: "I must say that a disproportionate share of the aid workers I’ve met in the wildest places over the years, long after anyone sensible had evacuated, have been evangelicals, nuns or priests. 

Case in point, Kristof says, Dr. Stephen Foster, 65, the son and grandson of African missionaries, who has himself spent his lifetime caring for Angolans who, in his region especially, suffer horrendous infant mortality rates. He's white, he's Christian, and he's been there forever.

It's no accident, Kristof says, that recent polling indicates that across the face of this nation, people have more respect for gays and lesbians (53%) than they do for evangelical Christians (42%). But witness Dr. Stephen Foster, he says, and claims Foster is not alone:  "The next time you hear someone at a cocktail party mock evangelicals, think of Dr. Foster and those like him," he writes. "These are folks who don’t so much proclaim the gospel as live it. They deserve better."

5. Holy Week, begins with a parade, the Lord of life, the King of Heaven and earth, coming into a town a celebrity. But long before the parade began, he determined that this triumphal entry was something he'd do on a donkey, a braying ass. That's how he came to us. 

That's what he was, a servant.

___________________ 

*Appeared here seven years ago, already. The word evangelical (see #4) has fallen into far greater disfavor in that time, sad to say.

For Ukraine, sunflowers

Last weekend, at the county Democratic convention, one woman, a long-time party regular, motioned to drop one of the party's "principles," one of the foundational givens of the platform. She said she'd never thought she would be saying what she was just then, but because of the senseless carnage in the Ukraine, she said she couldn't help thinking and saying that an old Democratic saw should be dropped, if only for the time being: military spending should be cut to make room for more and better social programs. 

People talk about what's happening in the Ukraine as a giant adjustment in "the world order." I'm not altogether sure of what "world order" is, but what is clear to me is that our understanding of Putin--and Russia--is simply not what it was a year or even four years ago, nor will it ever be. 

Yesterday morning brought a welcome respite from the horrors--a Russian general announced a significant reduction in Russian troops from the region surrounding Kiyv. Great news. I announced it to my wife as such when she had coffee in hand.

I left the news pretty much alone for the rest of the day, but by afternoon it seemed just about everyone was pooh-poohing that announcement, suggesting that whatever repositioning the Russian forces were doing was nothing more or less than repositioning to get ready for creating yet a new assault. So much for good news.

You may remember Putin's denial of any attack plans, even as a hundred thousand troops were assembled on Ukraine's eastern border. "No, no, no," he said. "All of your anxiety is nothing more or less than American paranoia." Bald-faced lie. 

Last weekend, Fox News called President Biden's off-script screed as yet another pathetic gaff by an old man growing more and more senile every day. I liked it, and I'm not sorry for saying that, coming as it did on the heels of his meeting some of the hoards of refugees--more than three million now, and still coming.

'For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power.'

Today, the war and the suffering continue. It's time to commend Ukraininan resolve again. With NATO's help, they've sustained control of most of their country and made the mighty Russian army look alarmingly like Keystone cops.

But death and destruction go on. There is no counting the homeless children. 

I can't help but repeat what I said silently in a prayer in church three weeks or so ago: "Take him out, Lord--take him out."

And for you, Ukraine, as much equipment as we can give--and whole bunches of sunflowers.

Brats and blessings - ii

It's difficult to imagine any reader out there who has five minutes to listen to Psalm 32, but go ahead and click on the above--it's not required listening, and it's the original lyric. It's what I remember, and what I remembered on Sunday last.

Our preacher, Rev. Van Someren, used to hand out mimeographed legal sheets full of psalms for us to recite each week. I don't know if he thought memorizing the catechism was too simple a task, but those long sheets were full of the intense religiosity the psalms offer and I can't forget. Always the psalms, too, just the psalms, some of them even Genevan.

I don't doubt that on some week back then Psalm 32 was the required text, but what came back to me on the Sabbath was not memorization but rendition. Strangely enough, it wasn't the preacher who made a sudden, unexpected appearance, it was his wife, Mrs. Van Someren, a tall woman, lanky and strong, a woman in tin-rims--the old-fashioned kind--that set on a face whose angles were far more sharp and defined than her personality, her hair forever pinned, not loose. Were she Catholic, she might have looked like one of sisters that shouldn't be crossed, a middle-school math teacher maybe, handy with the ruler she kept on top of her desk at the front of the room.

But she wasn't that, not at all. Last Sunday, she made an appearance somewhere near me in a pew in the old church downtown, the one our congregation abandoned when we built a new one a block south of where our family lived. The clarity of the unbidden memory was amazing. I didn't just see her singing Psalm 32, I saw her heart sing. She was praising God, being carried along by the richness of an old tune and its familiar but profound lyrics. 

How blessed is he whose trespass

Has freely been forgiven,

Whose sin is wholly covered

Before the sight of heaven.

Blest he to whom Jehovah

Shall not impute his sin,

Who have a guileless spirit,

Whose heart is true within. 

My mother the soloist used to commend Mrs. Van Someren's singing voice because my mother loved to see people project, loved to see people sing the way she did, with meaning and soul and excitement; but Mom the musician couldn't help telling us that Mrs. Van Someren was, rather painfully, too regularly a half-note flat. I thought of that too in church on Sunday, when Mrs. Van Someren was singing.

Here's verse two:

While I kept guilty silence

My strength was spent with grief.

Thy hand was steady on me,

My soul found no relief. 

I was sixty-some years in my own past, transported by an unbidden memory. When I riffle through those verses now, I can't help but think that being unforgiven may well have played in a role in that whole memory. I wasn't a nice boy--is anyone? I wasn't delinquent, but I was capable of thoughts and actions I knew very well weren't cherubic, weren't on the clearly posted list of parentally approved behaviors. 

But when I owned my trespass

My sin hid not from thee,

When I confessed transgression,

Then thou forgav'st me.

Musically, the bass line in the second half of each verse reaches up to b, a stretch for me. But when it does, it somehow makes the lyrics more plaintiff, more fraught with sadness, even horror. To scrub one's way to forgiveness requires the stern cleansing that most of us--and me, too, I guess, even back then--would do anything to avoid.

Two days ago, in church, was that Psalm 32 unearthing some childhood carnality?--I was nine, I think, when we left the old church. I doubt it. Besides, although that old psalm is all about guilt and sin, that's not what I saw in the proud and even happy face of the pastor's wife. It wasn't my sin, but her joy.

 

It is the last quatrain of the final verse that I saw last Sunday morning, a firm smile that testified to the promises she believed came from the very soul of God.

Then in the Lord be joyful, 

In song lift up your voice; 

Be glad in God, ye righteous, 

Rejoice, ye saints, rejoice.

That's it. 

The Van Somerens left our church sometime before I went off to high school. On occasion I'd see them, very infrequently. I can't say her husband is some kind of spiritual mainstay in my life. I used to despise his preacher's hands, so white and thin, so sadly unused in a congregation full of farmers and carpenters. But he was a good man, warm-hearted, loving, but maybe a B- from the pulpit. The Mrs. died just last summer, I'm told.

Her presence--her witness--appearing as she did in that treasured old psalm, was not only remarkable but stirring. She wasn't trying to lead the choir or cheer the troops. What her face registered was the immensity of having been forgiven. Far more than she herself would ever admit I'm sure, she was, for a moment right there before me, a saint. 

It's difficult not to believe that the visitation of such long-lost events--both the beauty of Mrs. Van Someren's singing, and the odd memory of my dad's mimicking a neon sign on a butcher shop come more readily to us as we age, maybe because there's just plain less room for more in whatever chest of memories each of us has tucked away somewhere amid the synopses. When there's less of a future than there's ever been, and when today often seems a jumble, at least we can find some modicum of comfort in the past, both in memories that run when we want them to and those that simply appear of their own volition. 

When I think of all those children of war and how their memories will forever carry remnant acts and tribulations, I can't help but be thankful that as I move farther and farther into old age, I won't be visited by horrors. I'll have my dad's old jokes and the elegant testimony of Mrs. Van Someren's Psalm 32--okay, like all of ours, maybe a half-note flat.

Brats and blessings -- i

Sunday night's sort of loosey-goosey around here--grab what you makes you salivate, cook it up or spoon it out or spread it--no rituals, pure free agency to get the job done--all of which, for me at least, often enough means hot dogs. My low-brow tastes don't rate with some, but there's no accounting for taste and mine is hot dogs--not cheapies, but good hot dogs.

So I pulled the package out of the drawer--"Johnsonville." They weren't the original Johnsonville brats, the ones known round the world, nor were they hot dogs exactly. Sausages, okay?--little things really. Grab a bun, nuke it and the brat, and in my book you're on your way to a sumptuous Sunday night.

"John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE. John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE."

Those already cooked brats conjured that line from a memory vault that seems full of things I didn't deliberately plant there, things that rise like the nubbins out back about to resurrect again if the temps ever warm. I didn't ask for that line to return, I didn't sit and think about it, my dad's voice just leaped out of that vault unbidden but perfectly in tact, as if it were yesterday we were coming past the Johnsonville shop: "John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE. John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE."  

That odd storage unit kicked out my dad's voice, prompted by nothing more than the label on those already-cooked brats. Dad was reading the neon sign on the shop across the tracks on Indiana Avenue, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was driving us back from Sheboygan, the city, to Oostburg, where we lived.

When we'd pass Johnsonville Meats, the birthplace of Johsonville brats, THE Johnsonville brats, the company that today sells the quintessential Sheboygan brats to 45 countries around the world, that neon sign out front ran the three parts of the butcher shop's name consecutively: "John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE," which my dad would say, musically, predictably, time and time again. But it wasn't just the sign that arose from my memory, it was Dad making it funny from up there behind the wheel. Sixty years ago, a lifetime ago.

That was the second such revelation from the deep to appear spiritually in my consciousness yesterday. The first was Psalm 32, not the psalm itself, but the hymn, which I don't believe I've sung in church for decades. Well, on the Sabbath  yesterday, we did, startlingly. I grew up on church hymnody comprised mostly of the psalms. Despite the fact that I hadn't sung that old psalm for years, somewhere in the recesses of my brain--and heart--it had never left.

So let the godly seek thee
In times when thou art near;
No whelming floods shall reach them,
Nor cause their hearts to fear.
In thee, O Lord, I hide me,
Thou savest me from ill,
And songs of thy salvation
My heart with rapture thrill.

That's the third verse! I knew every word. I don't know that I could have recited it before the lyrics appeared on the screen, but they weren't in the least unfamiliar. "Whelming floods"--sure. Swept me right back to my boyhood.

An old psalm is a long haul from smoked brats, but the inspiration is somehow grounded in psychic events that occur to all of us I'm sure, when suddenly some totally forgotten memory appears in neon across the face of our perceptions and interrupts the march of time we're all on, takes us back instead to some nondescript moment we're startled to realize we've not seemed to have forgotten--something as banal as a stuttering neon sign on a butcher shop, or something as sacred as hiding in the Lord.

(more tomorrow)

Sunday Morning Meds--Day after Day

 

“Day unto day they pour forth speech; 

night after night they display knowledge.” Psalm 19:2

In Psalm 19, and in this verse particularly, David is not given to hyperbole or flashing some kind of poetic license. He’s right, and he’s not stretching things. What he’s established in the opening line is that God himself can be seen and heard in the sheer expansive beauty of the heavens. A prairie landscape is the voice of God, he says, and that voice is there all the time, day after day and night after night, music that never stops, a celebration as eternal as anything this world can deliver. And it all speaks of Him. Isn’t it glorious? That’s what David is saying.

What makes him hammer the point home in verse two may well be that he can’t seem to believe it himself. Literally, God Almighty has created a canopy of praise that is always there over our heads, soaring above us all the time. “Day after day,” he says, as if we just don’t get it. “Night after night,” he says, as if none of us are really paying attention. Stop your infernal toiling and spinning once in a while, he says, and look up, for heavens sake.

In an essay titled “Gypsies,” Anne Lamott, in her own inimitable fashion, ridicules herself for being so infernally self-possessed. If she hasn’t already arrived, she’s dreadfully close to middle-age, she says, and, when she sees herself in a mirror, she finds the tell-tale earmarks terrifying (“triangles of fat that pooch at the top of my thighs”).

Some of her friends ask her to come along to a movie about gypsies, and she does, albeit reluctantly, because she says she’s too angry about her aging body; she would have preferred “an action movie, something with some tasteful violence.”

But the movie they attend brings her joy because she sees old gypsy women dancing with a level of measured self-abandon that she knows she needs. What she sees in their eyes is a portrait of the equanimity which promises to be ours, I think, if we let it: “the beauty of having come through.” Honestly, some of us long ago stopped fearing class reunions.

The movie she watched, like the heavens, are to Ms. Lamott the very voice of God. What she sees is exactly the skin cream she needs, not to cover the wrinkles, but to bless them. Those old dancing women remind her that she is, like them, becoming sanctified. Those old dancing women make her crows feet smile. Here’s the way she puts it:

Coming out of the movie that night, I realized that I want what the crones have: time for all those long, deep breaths, time to watch more closely, time to learn to enjoy what I’ve always been afraid of—the sag and the invisibility, the ease of understanding that life is not about doing.

David the poet-king would like those words, I think, because the everyday-ness of God’s voice above us is as startling as it can be only because we don’t pay attention, because I don’t pay attention, because, like Anne Lamott, I’m still believing that life is about doing and not about being, far more about proving myself and getting things done than it is about simply watching the sky.

Someday. Someday soon, maybe, we’ll all look up more often, because He’s always there preaching. I can’t believe it, and neither can David.

The heavens are declaring right now, he says, this very instant, and they’re not about to quit, if we only stop, and look, and listen. Day after day after day. . .

A Tale of Two Guvs

This is a tale of two governors, two Republicans, two conservative Republican governors, both of them besieged by a constituency with fear in their hearts and minds, a very specific fear that boys would deliberately fake their maleness in order to compete in girls'--womens'--athletics and then swim faster and jump higher than all their female competitors, doing all of that in order to gain prestige or glory or fame or whatever.

Two governors. Two states. Same worried and grieved constituency.

One of them, Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa, recently signed a bill that prohibits transgender females from participating in girls high school sports and women’s college athletics. Like a great politician, she turned the signing into a photo op, surrounding herself with brightly smiling young ladies. “No amount of talent, training or effort can make up for the natural physical advantages males have over females. It’s simply a reality of human biology,” so said Gov. Reynolds to all those justice-seeking young women. “Forcing females to compete against males is the opposite of inclusivity and it’s absolutely unfair.” 

A matter of justice, she called it, a matter of gender, a matter of fighting off the injustice of trans athletes competing against the plague of gender-busting boys, hungry for athletic trophies.

Her signing was a proud spectacle for Iowa conservatives, who had, with the governor's signature, successfully fought off the evil wokeness of the libs--and, in a stroke of genius, created in the minds of her immediate audience there in the office, an abiding sense of the righteousness of her--and their--position on this whole "trans" mess.

Did I mention an election coming up in a few month?

Have a look. That signing was just totally wholesome, all those young women learning justice and the American way. Look at those two little cuties just to the right of the Guv. Isn't that darling? They're learning how to keep those evil trans kids out.



Now have a look at this bald man. This is Governor Spencer Cox, of Utah. He's not signing a bill. He's not surrounded by a bevy of beautiful blonde young women, although he could have been--Utah is pretty much like Iowa, after all. Gov. Cox's constituency is just as conservative, maybe more so. For the record, in 2020,Trump won Utah with 58.1% of the vote, a margin of 20.5%. In Iowa, Trump bested Joe Biden, 53.1% to 44.9, which suggests that Utah may well be an even more conservative state than Iowa.

It might surprise you to learn that Governor Spencer Cox of Utah not only didn't surround himself by darling young women, he chose not to sign a similar bill at all. Yes, he's a Republican. Yes, he's conservative. I'm guessing, in Utah, he's also God-fearing. But he told the press he had other priorities than holding off a hoard of so-called "trans" young men looking to take state championships in women's sports.

Gov. Cox had significant concerns about the mental health of transgender kids. As he explained when he vetoed the bill, he was struck by several numbers--for instance, that 86 percent of trans youth have reported thoughts of suicide and 56 percent have reported a suicide attempt. Meanwhile, he explained that of the 75,000 high school kids who play high school sports in the Utah, only four are openly transgender, and of that four only one student plays on a girls’ team.

“Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what this is all about,” Cox wrote. “Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are part of something.”

But hold the fort. The Utah legislature swears it will override Governor Cox's veto. They simply won't have boys taking over girls sports in Utah. No way.

Utah looks a lot like Iowa, I'm thinking. When the legislature overrides his veto, they can gather a whole bunch of high school girls together--throw in a couple of kindergartners, too--to celebrate a righteous victory over the lib malaise that's threatening our freedoms.

Thank goodness.

Prairie Fire

 

They're making it. Fruit trees and bushes are growing up all over the homestead. A solid sod house stands behind them, a home to be proud of, even a spacious wooden barn out back. The family is all out front too for this portrait--Dad, Mom, a son and two daughters, all able family members. When there's work to be done on the homestead, there are enough hands to get it done and done well.

That's what they're telling the people who will receive this picture in the mail. "You were worried about us, maybe? Try not. We're doing very well out here."

Who knows where they came from? May have been New York, may have been Michigan, may have been Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands. May have been from almost anywhere, but right now they're almost literally and handsomely entrenched on 160-acres somewhere on that ocean of grass that's become, for them, a home.

They're not home free, however. Yesterday, my son sent a video of him fighting a grass fire that consumed three homes in Oklahoma, where he works as a fireman. This morning, right here--Alton, Iowa--there's a weather alert, even though we've just been kissed by two days of welcome wintery mix. We're in a "fire watch," from 4:00 this morning to 9:00 tonight: "gusty winds and low humidity will impact any fires that develop to likely spread rapidly. Outdoor burning is not recommended."

Quite frankly, it's hard to take that warning seriously, because it's difficult to imagine a a raging prairie fire. But prairie fires have a history here, where a sea of land was once nothing but grass. Prairie fires could consume entire townships, entire counties--and, terrifyingly, everything in them. . .everything, including this family's substantial start on the American dream. In twenty minutes, it could all go up in flames--and did.

I wrote this story after finding it in the history of a Holland, Nebraska, a Dutch settlements created just after the Civil War just south of Lincoln. It's a tragedy, one of the darkest stories in five years of Small Wonders; but it's part of our history here on the emerald edge of the Great Plains. 

https://www.kwit.org/post/fire-loss-and-what-cannot-be-said

Now available on Amazon (just click here).

Our Witness

Michael O'Keefe and OCU

Michael O'Keefe taught graphic design at Oklahoma Christian University for 41 years. No more. Less than a month ago, he was fired. Some students--it's unclear how many--were offended by words a guest speaker used in O'Keefe's class, words the speaker--who'd taught part-time at the Oklahoma Christian and was himself an alum--warned them he'd be using as he detailed the uniqueness of his life.

O'Keefe wanted his soon-t0-be-graduating seniors to recognize what students might encounter when they graduate, if they determine to live by a different code than others in their field. One of the speakers, the one who used graphic language to explain himself and his story, was gay. 

O'Keefe was summarily dismissed. Ostensibly, someone else is leading the class he was teaching. He's no longer welcome on campus. 

Do the math. O'Keefe couldn't have all that many years left before retirement. 

It was a tough job Christ had--I mean the sacrifice, the excruciating pain of separation from God, the pitiless humiliation of the cross. But he'd also suffered from the outrageous condemnation of the local religious authorities, the Pharisees, who had long ago determined the proper limits of an approved religious life. It was  meticulously outlined, then proclaimed, and determinedly enforced. Good religious people weren't to associate with sinners--with tax collectors, with fallen women, with--yucch!--Samaritans. That wasn't at all kosher. It was verboten. Don't even think about it.

See what's happening in this cartoon drawing from The Naked Pastor? Six of us are carefully drawing in lines that help us gain a certain righteous exclusivity. We're each outlining a fortress into which we--and we alone--can live. The lines are walls; we mark off what's exclusively ours, lines that allow us to believe that we can hold off the claims of the Devil, sin itself. 

And that guy in the middle, in the crown? That's Jesus Christ, who is unmistakably erasing the lines we draw on the concrete. 

I grew up at the end of an era, a time when stock traders were thought to be speculators and gamblers. They could be church members, but they certainly couldn't hold church office because they dealt in dealing. 

I grew up at the end of an era when public confession of sin was a thought to be the earmark of a true church. I once saw a pregnant young woman standing at the front of the church undergoing what the elders claimed was "church discipline."

I grew up at the end of an era when divorce was so evil that those who left their marriages thereby lost their place at communion. 

I grew up at the end of a time when most of the righteous people in my church did not--glory be! would not--turn on a television on the Sabbath. 

I grew up at the end of an era when the college I attended told student dorm counselors to, come the Sabbath, put tape over the coin slots on pop machines, at the end of an era when dancing was strictly verboten, when a 26-year-old student was put on probation because someone from town had seen him, in a restaurant 20 miles away, having a glass of wine with his meal. 

I grew up at the end of an era when lots of people looked exactly like the half-dozen of us in the picture above, when drawing lines meant to define what was good and proper and what wasn't seemed an admirable characteristic of most Christian fellowships, when Christians students from Wheaton were appalled by Christian students at Calvin holding cigarettes, but when Christian students at Calvin were appalled by Christian students at Wheaton who frequented restaurants on the Sabbath.

I can't help but think that the LBGTQ horrors evangelicals confront today is what's outside the boxes we're working so hard to draw in. 

Isn't it wonderful that Oklahoma Christian feels itself a bit more righteous today because it so decisively acted to keep its students pure? 

I'm saying we've seen it all before. We call O'Keefe's firing "a witness" because it is. 

Of what? That's the very difficult question that has no easy answers.

(continued from yesterday) 

It's time, she tells herself, to go theological herself, and press the pedal to the metal. "Okay," she says to her husband's stubbornness, "if all of Abe's sins were forgiven on Calvary, then that forgiveness includes all his iniquities--including his last one." If she's not arguing the truth about forgiveness, she thinks, then, well, her Calvinist husband is buying into the whole "works righteousness" argument, the heretical idea that we are ourselves responsible for our own salvation. She knows her husband can't buy "free will." It's like totally un-Calvinistic. "Nobody gets saved because of asking/or not asking," she says, "but because God is merciful."

Then she stumbles. "Though I admit," she says, "that people usually ask." That line "cost her," Sietze says, and allows her father to swing back: "Where the tree falleth, there let it lie."

To Mom, Abe in hell is still unthinkable. She adjusts her footwork by trying to argue redundancy, although Sietze senses she's on thin ice. If, by grace, our sins are forever forgiven, then we honestly don't need to ask forgiveness anyway, she says--or something to that effect. It simply can't be true that his final act with that shotgun nullifies his salvation simply because he didn't ask for forgiveness? "If asking forgiveness/ for sins already forgiven is proper, then praying/ for Abe is also proper. We shouldn't take any/ of God's mercies for granted."

The logic is strained. All three of them understand she's losing.

That's when Mom gives up the theology and goes after her husband's own struggles, his own sadness. He hasn't taken a bite of his pork chop. He's forgotten to eat. His supper is getting cold, she says, because all of this is horribly painful. "Look at you," she says, "you haven't eaten your pork chop." You're just as consumed by Abe's suicide as I am. Don't hide behind scripture.

She knows why he's just been stripped naked. Finally, the whole business of salvation is completely and undeniably unknowable. She plays the ace or the Rook card, goes to the book of Psalms, 145:2: "God greatness is unsearchable." That, she says, is the bottom line. It's not wrong to pray for Abe because, you know, we can't know everything. We aren't God, and He is. 

Here's how Sietze tells it. "Yet the unsearchableness/of God raised the debate above whether any Protestant/had ever done this before or what would the preacher say if we told him." 

His mother took the argument into the rarified air of the divine nature of God. We can't know because "God's greatness is unsearchable."  "Abe will go wherever God/ has planned," his mother says, "but is it impossible that God/has also planned that Abe will join/the other saints again in answer/to our prayer? Then how can we refuse to pray?"

End of story. 

It's Sietze who asks, in reflection, whether his father remembers the one night he prayed for the dead: "Be as gracious/to our friend Abe as your decrees/and righteousness will allow, and help/us all to enter in at the strait gate, Amen."

"Was it, you, or God who worked that miracle?" he asks his mother, before all three began to pick on their cold porkchops.

The elaborate theology of the poem brought them no comfort. The two pugilists, and their son the non-combatant, finally break bread together only when they gather beneath their mutual belief in God's unsearchable greatness, which is to say, blessedly, that their only comfort is that they all--even Abe the suicide--belong to a God who's greatness is unsearchable.

My kids didn't really get it all that much, didn't love the show, didn't really follow all that silly theology. They didn't grow up in a similar world, even though just about all their friends had monstrous Dutch names. 

The characters in Purpaleanie are drawn from a time and a place that's can't and won't be replicated. The only real constant is change. 

But me?--I hear the arguments that night in Sietze's dining room, and I can't help enjoying it. I know the territory, the expressive theology. But I also know the humanness, and, like Sietze's mother, I can't help believing that God's greatness is unsearchable.

"Where the tree falleth. . ." -- i

I'm still hurt, 17 years later, by my kids'--adult children and their adult cousins-- indifference. They'd gone off together to see the performance of a musical, Stanley Wiersma's Purpaleanie, entirely created and staged by people who'd created and staged it 15 years before that. 

It never dawned on me that they wouldn't be taken by the show. I sang its praises from the heavens. I bragged on it, told them they'd love it; but when they returned. . . you know--"eh" and a shrug of their mutual shoulders. I was shocked; worse, I was heartbroken, stunned that they too didn't sing its praises. "Ah, so-so." The flat of a hand.

It took me some time to realize that what they watched happening on stage simply wasn't their lived experience. The lives they saw and heard up there--the lives Stanley Wiersma creates--weren't theirs. In a sense, they didn't get it. 

Tomorrow night, a book club that meets at the museum will be discussing Purpaleanie, so I've been reading through those darling folk tales again, poems that capture life among the theologically-fortified citizenry of Sioux County, Iowa, church members all, citizens of the 40s and 50s, Dutch Reformed rural folk who are, I admit, far closer to my people than my children's.

Last night I came to "'Where the Tree Falleth, There Let it Lie," a heart-felt battle of wits between a God-fearing father and his loving wife, whose soul is torn
up by the news that Abe, the Fuller Brush man, had "blown his brains out" with a 12-gauge. It's a simple request really: grieving deeply, she asks her husband to pray for Abe, even though she knows, theologically, that Reformed Christians don't, like the Roman Catholics and the Mormons, pray for the dead. There's no reason, after all, to supplicate for a man whose soul has already been properly assigned.

What's not written in the poem is an ancient theological argument that the despair Abe had to feel to end his life means he was a man living without hope. Since true believers can never be hopeless, Abe is damned. "Where the tree falleth, there let it lie," Dad says, allowing that single Old Testament passage to do the heavy lifting.

Wiersma, who wrote with the pen name "Sietze Buning," speaks most lovingly of his mother in the poem. To begin, Sietze tells her he remembers the one moment she dared to tangle theologically with her pious husband: "How could she keep up with you, Dad?" What we're about to hear, her son says, is the only time she tried. All she wanted was for Dad to pray for poor Abe. 

When he repeats the line from Ecclesiastes, he tell her plainly that we don't pray for the dead because in God's plan what Abe did to himself and those he loved is what he was appointed to do, a horrifying argument. "Don't mess with God's plans," he might have said. "I'm not praying for Abe. Case closed."

"Ecclesiastes 11." That's what we read [present tense] in the Bible, woman, ja?

Let there be no doubt she understood her husband's refusal. She's not interested in arguing theology, but she is interested in saying something to God about the horror of what just happened. A day before, when Abe was there pedaling his wares, the two of them had sung together some of the old psalm faves--42, 68, 84. "Knew them as well as you or I, mind you," she tells her stone-faced husband, "and knew some, like seventy-two, that I didn't even know."

That argument is meant to clean up that blasted tree that's felled. There's a character witness here; after all, "by their fruits shall you know them." How could a man sing the psalms as richly as he had and then, the next day, reject hope entirely? Abe's story simply can't be colored within the theological lines she's supposed to use as a template over all of our lives. 

Once more, agonizingly, her husband repeats the divine bromide. That's all.

Even though she's never taken him on, Ecclesiastes 11:3 doesn't stanch the blood. Then pray for Abe for my sake, she says, her second argument. Pray for him to relieve my guilt, she says, for not talking with Abe about his salvation when he was right here in my kitchen. 

                                I never said, 'Abe

though you walk through trouble sore/God

will restore/your fainting spirit.'

If only I had said it, Abe might

be alive now."

Pray for him, but do it for me, she says. For my sake, pray for Abe who's gone.

"'Where the tree falleth," he says, no pause, "there let it lie.'" 

The argument they wage isn't a squabble that pinch-hits for some ongoing battle in their relationship. It's an argument about the nature of God himself, a theological argument mounted between two great forces--the relative importance of both grace and truth. Dad chooses biblical truth drawn from a single passage of scripture: "Where the tree falleth, there let it lie." Mom won't have truth stand in for grace and mercy.

There's more to the story. More tomorrow.

Sunday Morning Meds--Planted

“. . .like a tree planted by streams of water. . .Psalm 1:3

Once upon a time, my father received a job offer from an association of Christian schools in another state. I don’t remember the offer myself--I was far too young--but I know my father’s character well enough to be able to imagine how thrilled he must have been because to him, working for Christian education would have been like being in the direct employ of the Lord Almighty.

At the time, I know he thought he wasn’t. He was doing some accounting work for a heavy-equipment industry run by a bunch of yahoos who liked to wheel-and-deal and party far better than my father did, the preacher’s kid.

Armed with that blessed new job offer, he must have gone the rounds. I’m not sure what my mother said when he told her. I should have asked her, I guess. But I know what happened when he spoke to my grandfather, his father-in-law. Grandpa cried. My father told me that, years later.

My father didn’t lament those tears. When he told me that story, he didn’t raise a fist and declare that, right then and there, it was Grandpa’s fault he couldn’t take that great job. But the story he told had lines I didn’t have to draw in.

Grandpa cried because he didn’t want his daughter to move so far from home, a new house he and Grandma had built just a block away from the heart of the village where stood his blacksmith shop/gas station. Grandpa cried because he didn’t want his grandchildren gone. Grandpa, the blacksmith, bawled, and Dad hung in for a few more years with roisters.

There’s always more to the story, and this one has some significant antecedent action. Grandpa’s only other daughter was killed in freakish car accident not that many years before. Grandpa—and Grandma—had already suffered just the death of a child; they didn’t want to lose another, even if its agent was only distance.

I’m told that my grandfather’s emotions were legendarily promiscuous. But I’ll excuse the tears this time because I never lost a child and he did. If he bawled when my father asked about his taking a job that my father might have believed came directly from the council of the Lord, I’ll forgive Grandpa and those tears.

Most all fiction begins in the mind of the writer with a single question: “what if”? The “what if?” of this little family story may be obvious. If my aunt hadn’t been killed and my Grandpa would not have cried, would my father have left the state and taken the job of his dreams? And even more to the point—if all of this had happened, who would I be, having grown up in a whole different world? And now, all these years later, who on earth would I be?

It’s of more than passing interest to me that the tree of Psalm 1 is “planted.” Someone put it down on the banks of that metaphorical river. The particular spot wasn’t necessarily the choice of the whirly-gig maple seed; that spot was chosen.

When I think of old blacksmith’s tears, it’s almost impossible not to believe that we are not our own. There must be a design to this madness. Someone’s in control. Someone, or so it seems to me, does the planting. 

 I’m a witness.

Those weird crosses on golden onions

It has a long and interesting history. It's been the semi-official cross of the Orthodox Church since the sixth century, since before the split  that separated the Orthodox and what became the Roman Catholic church. (Protestants are Johnny-come-latelies.) 

It grabs you if you've never seen them. It's almost shocking when you see them for the first time atop those golden onions so Russia-redolent. It seemed so strange, last summer, to stumble off a main road somewhere in Alaska, poke through some trees, and there find a little country church like this one, a cemetery beside it, home to dozens of these strange crosses.  

It's as some well-meaning craftsman nailed a cross together and found a couple of crosspieces left over and simply tacked them on too.

Which isn't, of course, true. There's meaning behind those extra adornments, one of the arms completely understandable, the other a bit more imaginative. There are three here, although in the closeup below one of them, on the closest cross, is blessed with an abundance of roses obscuring the arm most of us are accustomed to seeing. 

Up top is the one Herod used to designate Jesus of Nazareth as, mockingly, "King of the Jews." There's nothing written there on any of them in this cemetery, but that's the explanation commonly offered. The one beneath the traditional arm, the bottom crosspiece, is crooked, bent so as to aim, at once, both up and down.

The Orthodox cross more explicitly rehearses the original story by suggesting Christ's companions up there on Calvary, two thugs, two thieves, one of whom recognized the Jesus's innocence and the horror of what was happening beside him, while the other just, well, harrumphed. The right side of the cross, aimed upward, points toward the paradise Christ promised the repentant sinner. The left side reminds us of the other thief and his far less pleasant eternal destination.

Maybe it's just me, but this morning it seems to me that it's easy to be orthodox (small o). It's not difficult at all to look at this salad of golden onions, each thrusting skyward, and think that something is askew, something off, something is wrong here, almost heathen, a kind of perversion maybe. Why on earth would people with put those gold onions on their roof, then adorn them with that weird cross? They must worship some strange God. 

Not really. 

We didn't visit the Transfiguration of our Lord Church on a Sabbath morning. Front door was locked. We couldn't get in. But the stairs are worn, even a little beaten up. People attend that church. People belong. People--members--see that third cross bar on crosses all over the place, that bottom arm pointing at the only two directions all of them understand are real possibilities.

It's easy to create lines where there not needed, to create boxes in which to enclose our self-righteous selves, to construct a fortress to keep out the chaff. We're good at drawing lines in the sand that only a good and blessed tide can erase. 

I'm more than happy to be part of the Reformed family of a Protestant tradition borne of the Reformation. I'm not looking to change.

But I'm not alone and I'm not a judge.

Morning Thanks--Church as social capital

It's not, well, shocking, not even terribly surprising; still it was a blessing to read it and it did make good sense sense. Goes like this.

Being a male, these days, isn't a joy ride. Today, like it or not, power is shared. Women bosses are in the ascendency, women's literature is touted, women's rights is the what's magic-markered on the protest sign, because women are empowered. Today, it's all about women. For a long, long time--as long as could be remembered--it's been all about men. No more.

A photographer named Eli Rezkallah created a series of ads, like the one at the top, that he called “In A Parallel Universe." He flipped ye olde gender roles in a fashion that makes most men wince. Here's another.





Generally speaking, I'd say, these silly creations are funny--if you're a woman. But men, I'm thinking, might not split a gut.

Not until 1972 (to some of us, that' s not long ago!), women were simply barred from voting in the local CRC. Only men. Much later, I served in all-male consistories where the mere thought of women in those chairs was anathema. Good men, fine Christian men, wouldn't hear of such a thing. Just about all of the Christian Reformed churches in the region still ordain only men for the offices of elder and deacon.

A century ago women's suffrage finally won the day in American life. It's fair to say that when the U. S. Constitution uses the word "man," it doesn't mean all of us--it means men.

Medical schools are full of women. Biden's cabinet is meant to "look more like America," a variety of races and equal gender positioning. Today, it's offensive for a bunch of men to tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies.

The old way is dead as a doornail. Men students drop out of college like flies. Women fill the spaces. That level of power shift has been tough on boys, on men. By studying male students in colleges and universities, Ilana M. Horwitz, an assistant professor of Jewish studies and sociology and Tulane University, has come up with a remarkable discovery that really isn't all that surprising.

Want to understand what pushes working-class males into staying in school and getting a degree (something that appears to make adult life easier for those who stay in)? Want to know what makes some men develop a moral compass and stay with it when it speaks to them about life and behavior?

The answer is church. Plain and simple. Church.

Practiced religion--not just "I'm very spiritual but I don't go to church"--doesn't do it. Practiced religion does.

Go on. Read it here.

Since the early 2000s, just as the kids in my study were entering adolescence," she writes, "there has been a drastic rise in the number of working-class men dying “deaths of despair” from opioids, alcohol poisoning and suicide."

The academic advantage of religious working-class children begins in middle and high school with the grades they earn. Among those raised in the working class, 21 percent of religious teenagers brought home report cards filled with A’s, compared with 9 percent of their less-religious peers. Grades are also the strongest predictor of getting into and completing college, and religious boys are more than twice as likely to earn grades that help them be competitive for college admissions and scholarships.

It was a special blessing to read all of this this morning, for which I'm thankful. I'd never quite thought of church-going in that way before--as providing what sociologists call "social capital." Makes good sense. Makes God-sense.

Small Wonders--the book

On the recommendation of a visual artist I know, I applied for and received a kind of fellowship to be a writer-in-residence at a National Park, this one on land that belonged to the very first recipient of the National Homesteading Act in 1863, a park just outside of Beatrice, Nebraska. They put me up for two weeks, during which time my only responsibility was to hold down some space in the welcome center, be busy developing my work, and, if asked, answer questions when visitors dropped by.

I loved it. Any application for the fellowship had to include a plan for what I'd produce at the place. I'd thought about it some, then decided to try to complete a range of short vignettes that captured some segments of area history. In the obligatory introductory trip around the monument grounds, the park ranger showed me the library and told me I was welcome to borrow any books at any time. 

Just a couple hours later, I found a blessing from above, a book of vignettes from white folks who'd settled the Nebraska frontier. It was--and is--priceless.

Here's one of the first stories I wrote. Listen. "Music of the Spheres.

I did a dozen or so during of those little historical sketches during those two weeks. When I got home, I decided to write KWIT, Siouxland Public Media, the NPR people in Sioux City, and tell them what I'd done, ask them if they'd like to have a look, and let them know I'd be glad to send them a bunch.

Yup, they said, and from then on it's been a go. I've haven't counted how many "Small Wonder(s)" I've submitted, but it's got to be over 100. 

So the writer in me thought I'd put a bunch together into a book. How? Well, one of the most amazing stories I'd heard in the last few years is the discovery of an ancient river trail through the bluffs along the Missouri near the confluence of the Big Sioux. As if there still is a trail there, a trail once trod only by Yanktons and Omahas, I decided to choose stories that follow Old Muddy, America's longest river, and collect the tales that sprouted from its ever-changing banks. 

Thus, Small Wonders: A Museum of Missouri River Stories, available now from Amazon. Just click right there.

Fred Manfred once told me that once he'd finished milking one night, he sat out on the back step and told himself there had to be more to the story of this land. History didn't simply begin with his family's living on an acreage just outside of Doon. There had to be a story there.

I live in a region with a glorious past that's often more than a little inglorious. This is Manifest Destiny country. When my great-grandparents came to this land, it never dawned on them that someone else had lived here, and lived and loved here richly. This land was simply ours--the white man's--to claim and use. That conflict, as much as any, creates unending stories. 

Like this one, just now available on KWIT, the pioneer story of a the first Native American woman to graduate from medical school and practice medicine here. She was Omaha. 

Her story is from Small Wonders (the radio broadcast) and in Small Wonders (the book). I made the book, created it, cover to cover, and, resultingly, it's still got more than its share of goofs, needs an editor other than its author.

But it's been a ball to do--and the stories keep coming, lots of them. They're all around, just waiting for old crows like me to swoop down and devour. They're wonders, all of them, small wonders that really aren't small at all. 

Confluence of the Little Sioux and Missouri Rivers

A prayer for getting along

It was never an easy thing to do. Even though the Jewish people didn't know the whole truth about wherever they were going, they knew enough to understand that having been demanded to meet in a city park and taking with them but one little suitcase, middle of the night--they knew they weren't going on a hayride. They were going to be taken somewhere they didn't want to go. They wanted to stay home. 

Some of the lucky ones--the Dutch lost a higher percentage of their Jewish citizens than any other occupied nation in Europe--some few lucky ones got stolen away by daring friends who actively opposed what they couldn't help but see as horrifying injustice. 

Some got themselves transported out into the country, to farms and small towns where before the war very few of the locals had seen a Jew. But then, most rural folks didn't see a Jew out there later because the Jewish families were all hidden away, afraid not only of the SS, but also the Dutch Nazis who were often worse than the Germans who ran operations, more hated at least. The Dutch Nazis knew very well that if and when they were could find hidden Jews, they'd be recipients of the very farms where those Jews had been hidden. You risked a great deal--even your life--if you hid Jews, had lots to gain by turning them in.

What many people don't talk much about is the burden it was for big Dutch families or even bachelor farmers to hide Jews. Let's be clear--most Jews in the Netherlands were city-dwellers for generations. There weren't many synagogues out in Friesland and beyond. Dutch Jews were citified and often highly educated and well off. Dutch farmers or sailors, the Dutch cultural matrix from which I originate, were a foreign legion to sophisticated Jewish city-dwellers. 

And the plain fact of the matter is that everyone assumed the war wasn't going to last all that long--a number of weeks maybe, if that, and the whole business would be settled and over with.

One of Mark Twain's finest lines makes the claim that guests, like fish, start to stink after three days. Consider this: lots and lots of rural folk had houseguests that didn't leave for four long years. Sometimes hosts and guests just didn't get along all that well, or didn't much like each other either. Diet Eman used to tell me that her buggiest problem in taking care of the Jews they had hidden in all those farm places was interpersonal. Hosts and guests were all Dutch; they shared a common enemy and a common language, but in many ways they were not at all alike. But there they were, jammed together, the Jews hidden away so they never, ever saw the light of day. There were no choices. No one could leave without everyone being in danger of their lives.

And there are stories of exploitation, too, stories of abuse, stories of unrighteous acts. Heroism is heroism, but it's not always angelic.

Last night a news program featured the wonderful and warm reception of a schoolroom full of Ukrainian kids being welcomed--applauded-- as they walked into a brand new school for them in Italy. The kids made the guests feel loved. Brought tears to my eyes.

But I remember the understandable complications that occurred in occupied Holland during the war, hosts and guests padlocked together when they found it impossible to live with each other without, well, bitching.

Today, thousands of families have strangers beneath their roofs, maybe for the first time, people who don't speak their language and have only what their hosts can spare from their own cupboards. People who have no idea how long they'll be there or where they'll be a month from now.

Bless them, Lord, bless them all with courage and patience and a helping of your own divine will. Bless them with peace and an open heart that simply won't fill up or shut down. Bless 'em all, Lord. Bless 'em, every one. 

Congregational prayer

As a rule--or so it seems to me--today at least, the "imprecatories" don't pray well. What's more, the Book of Psalms include a lot of them, twenty at least, some impossible to forget.

Psalm 5 is the first, although others are more venomous. "Listen to me, Lord," the psalmist says, using the command form, as if God is his Secretary of Defense. This morning prayer of his seems an assertion he believes God Almighty is obliged to answer. "The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity," he says. "Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the Lord will abhor the bloody and deceitful man." What he's doing is reminding the Creator of Heaven and Earth to do his job.

But that's not the fifth psalm's imprecatory-ness. Harken!--here's the embarrassingly Old Testament-ish stuff: "For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue. Destroy thou them, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; cast them out in the multitude of their transgressions; for they have rebelled against thee (vs. 9 and 10).

Their "throat is an open grave" is a foul metaphor to keep you up at night, don't you think?

And Psalm 5 isn't the most appalling of the imprecatory psalms. Psalm 137:9 champions the bloodiest horror imaginable: "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." (I should have started this thing with a parental warning.)

I've never known quite what to do with those verses. How do you translate such hot-tempered viciousness into our times? How on earth can people make music with those words?

Occasionally, congregational prayer leaves silences for each of us to fill with our own petitions or thanks or adoration. Yesterday, in the first round I did some confession, but when the silence opened for a second round, I asked the Lord to do something to stop the bloody horrors in the Ukraine. I don't remember how exactly I started, but I ended with sheer imprecation. "Take him out, Lord," I said, as if God Almighty was a sniper in camo, sprigs of a bush affixed to his helmet. 

"Take him out, Lord," I said, and I'll say it again this morning. "Take Putin out so the world can be done with him." In essence, I say it every time I see those children, the babies, on the run, going someplace they don't know where, or when I see bombed-out hospitals or nuclear plants under attack. "Take him out, Lord." The minute I said it, I realized I'd never asked anything quite like it before in church, unlike any other in my three score and ten. Yesterday, in church, I asked the Lord  God Almighty to kill a man, and soon.

The Psalms are the most human of the books of the Bible. As Calvin says, those 150 poems offer us ourselves in every shade and mood--loneliness, despair, comfort, edification, admonition, ecstacy, beloved spiritual fulfillment in quiet waters. It's all there. As we wander this vale of tears, no better guidebook exists than the psalms. We're in them ourselves. We're there too. Everything we'll ever feel is in those poems, holy writ and human writ. We're never alone.

But never before in my life did I feel the heft of the imprecatories as I did yesterday and do right now. Putin is a cosmic villain, an angel of death, who deserves what he has doled out to millions of others. He deserves death and hell.

Amen.