A concerning smile

Rows empty out toward the center aisle every Sunday in our church. Then, people turn towards the communion table at the front, where we receive the sacrament. It's quite simple really, this processional, this ritual flow; and it happens every Sunday in typically Dutch Reformed order. There's no chaos because people move, in-line, for the sacrament.

A few Sundays ago, I waited my turn to stand, then walked between the rows of chairs toward the center, where I took the bread and wine, then returned to the aisle where I'd been seated, and took my chair.

The wrong one, or so I discovered, when a darling third-grader came back from the sacrament and, with admirable discretion, simply stood beside my seated self and looked at me, bearing an insistent but compassionate smile to remind me that I'd sat down on a chair one short of where I was supposed to be, one chair closer to her family. It had to rank among the sweetest admonitions I have ever received. 

Her mom was one of my favorite students some years ago, and I can't help but think that her third-grader knew at least something about that old man sitting one chair away from the one where he was supposed to sit. She said nothing, just gave me a concerning look. 

I processed her suggestion, motioned at the chair to my left, moved one over, and received an appropriate, thankful smile. It was perfectly darling moment of blessed interaction between two human beings, three score and a few years apart, who became, at that moment, fast Platonic friends. Every Sunday morning since, she smiles at me with that same knowing smile, and I smile back.

Last week, with our pastor gone, we had a woman for a preacher. Doesn't happen often, but it has happened before and will happen again. It wouldn't happen at some churches in town, but that's their choice. She delivered a sermon that noted the relationship between earthly and heavenly things, almost as as introduction to the sacrament of communion, as if her job that day was to lay out the plain facts of the mystery we celebrate with body and blood. 

Me and Ms. Third-Grader were sitting a row apart last Sunday, she and her family behind us. But I couldn't help thinking of how she might perceive a woman behind the pulpit. In all likelihood, having a woman preacher happened before in her life--I'm guessing it wasn't rare or striking or terribly unusual. 

Way back in the 80s, I attended synods of the CRC at times when the chambers were filled with men and women anxious about how the church's ruling body might come down on the clamorous issue of women in ecclesiastical office. Some churches left the denomination rather than share the table with those who, plain and simple, didn't believe what the apostle Paul so clearly said about women keeping silent in church.

Sitting there between the preacher and little celebrant, I couldn't help thinking how different church life was for this young lady, how different it would be from the way my wife, who today is an elder, might have perceived it when she was a third-grader seated in a pew in an old, big church not so far away. 

Some folks in the neighborhood think our congregation is progressive, even liberal. Even in the church I attend, some people are not comfortable with our carrying that reputation, would choose, if they could, to dull that perception.  

I hope my third-grade friend will allow me to say what I'm going to, but I'd like to assert that the two of us. . . well, we're okay with it, more than happy to be where we are. 

I can't help thinking that if she could read all of this and understand it, she wouldn't say a word, just give the grandpa sitting beside her a gentle, understanding smile.

Buechner on "Mysticism"

Mysticism is where religions start. Moses with his flocks in Median, Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the waters of Jordan--each of them is responding to Something of which words  like Shalom, Nirvana, God even, are only pallid souvenirs. Religion as ethics, institution, dogma, ritual, Scripture, social action--all of this comes later and in the long run maybe counts for less. Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat--to put it mildly--or with a bush going up in flames, a rain of flowers, a dove coming down out of the sky. "I have seen things," Aquinas told a friend, "that make all my writings seems like straw."

Most people have also seen such things. Through some moment of beauty or pain, some sudden turning of their lives, most of them have caught glimmers at least of what the saints are blinded by. Only then, unlike the saints, they tend to go on as though nothing has happened.

We are all more mystics than we choose to let on, even to ourselves. Life is complicated enough as it is. 

--Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words

I knew Eugene Peterson. I've been reading his biography. When we read these words last night from Buechner, I couldn't help thinking that Eugene would have loved the wisdom so wondrously rendered.

Hup! Hup! Orange City!

On this score, my judgement can be trusted. Here's why. First, like it or not, I am 100% Dutch-American, fourth and fifth generation perhaps, but I know a Wilhelmina peppermint when I see one. I own a pair of wooden shoes in fact, a gift from the Dutch in Holland, MI (they wouldn't fit me, but why destroy a forest?).

What's more, I don't live in Orange City, never have. My wife claims it as her hometown, but she was a farm girl who went off to Hull for high school. Her mother was vintage Orange City, even Tulip Queen, but today my wife and I live on the northern edge of Alton, where, it is rumored, the people are either Catholic or Hollanders who can't live with Hollanders. 

What's more, I've lived most of my life in Sioux Center, a rival burg which has slugged it out with Orange City for most of its existence, a place where most people I knew think of Tulip Festival as a theme park, great for kids but primarily brainless--"did my ancestors dance in the streets. Verdrommel, no," I used to say. "So you pull on nutty costumes no sane Dutch man or woman would wear today, you slavishly scrub streets and pay unholy prices to put your kids on silly rides, and you call that 'heritage'? Gimme a break."

Ten years ago we moved to Alton. I've spent time on two Orange City committees. One of them, the Arts Council, brought musical talent from around the world to town. It was wonderful. These days, I spend time on the Museum Board. In fact, this year I'll be riding at the head of the Tulip Festival parade because the Board has been chosen at this year's Parade Marshall. I've seen Orange City in action. It seems to me that my judgment in such things is objective. 

"What things?" you say.

If you haven't already heard, AARP has ranked Orange City, Iowa, as the fourth best small town in the entire U. S. of A., right there behind Aspen, Colorado; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Great Neck Plaza, NY. Yes, such generalized rankings can be arbitrary. Yes, Orange City is hundreds of miles from any major metropolis. Yes, we can be painfully provincial. No matter. Here's the article, read it for yourself.

My judgment? That kind of ranking is earned and, well, lovely. Good for Orange City. Great for Orange City.

Here's my analysis. Sioux Center wants to be another Sioux Falls. They want to go big. Landing Wal-Mart changed everything, made the whole place jump with business. Sioux Center wants muscle, motion, and money. 

Orange City is quite happy to be a fine European village, where a cup of coffee downtown is but a satisfying pause in a celebration of life. You've been to Europe. You know what I'm talking about. Orange City wants to be charming.

And it works at that vision by way of its Tulip Festival. Say what you want about pofferjes and saucijsjes, but TF requires a standing army willing to spend weeks of their time planning for and pulling off a three-day carnival that almost always suffers some awful weather.

What's more, in preparation, scores of Orange Citians look closely at their own past, at what they call "heritage." I'll grant you that such research is at times a mile wide and a foot deep, but it's a task that's taken on every year. In Orange City, people care about their town and its history that's produced a level of extraordinary civic pride.

Just a few years ago, the museum decided to try to get people in the doors by putting on a series of programs about local history. Honestly, I would have been pleased had a couple dozen shown up for the first presentation--100 people did. Every year since, our "Nights at the Museum" productions gather that kind of crowd. We had to get rid of a fine Native American tipi just to accommodate the crowds. 

Last week, it was a visiting poet. Almost 70 people showed up, and a great time was had by all, including the poet, because Orange City nurtures a thoughtful tradition of civic pride. 

So this Altonite who hails from Sioux Center, says, "Hup, hup, hup, Orange City," fourth best small town in the USA. Good for you. 

Small Wonder(s)--That Akimbo Cross

The day lilies planted around the little frame church are mostly a weed patch. The dried-up front door begs paint, the cross at the peak just above it is bent slightly in fashion that’s sad for a cross, sort of akimbo. An electrical cord from somewhere inside dangles over the peak, suggesting that if you want juice inside you set up a generator on the badly-pitched front step.

A young woman from the Flandreau Indian School just across the street smiled strangely at me when I asked her if there was any possibility I could go in. You know the look--"why on earth would you want to?" St. Mary's Chapel looks like a place so long ago left behind that what's inside could be nightmarish. Its best years are memories. If that.

"It belongs to the tribe," she told me, meaning not the school. The two are separate in the small town of Flandreau, South Dakota, not all that far away. Oddly enough, the tribe, the Santees, aren’t so much a part of the school, so the two are separate in the way things can be separate in small towns, as in, well, walled off.

The namesake of St. Mary’s Chapel is not the mother of our Lord, but a woman named Mary Hinman, whose story--what can be known of it—may well be remembered best by her tombstone in a tiny cemetery about 160 miles south in Santee, Nebraska. Mary Hinman was the dutiful wife of the Rev. Samuel Hinman, dreamer, prophet, mover-and-a shaker, and tireless Episcopalian priest who suffered heroically all the tribulations the Santees did, with them, after the Dakota War, when most of them were run out of Minnesota.

Samuel Hinman, her husband buried 300 of the people he served on a bloody path of imprisonment from the Lower Sioux Reservation to Ft. Snelling, Minnesota, to Ft. McClellan, Iowa, to Crow Creek, South Dakota, and finally to a kindly strip of reservation land along the Missouri in northeast Nebraska.

Whether Hinman had time for a marriage will forever be a good question. For years, he and Mary were miles and cultures apart. He was building a mission dedicated to the suffering Santees, a school and a church on the brand new reservation, along with a home for his wife and children, all of it with funds from donors back east.

Then a tornado destroyed everything, flattened the house he'd built for his wife and sons. Mary Hinman died, sometime later, of injuries from which she never fully recovered.

The stone in the cemetery at the Santee Reservation testifies to her love for the people she and her husband served in the Church of the Most Merciful Savior, the church her husband founded. That stone bears a glorious legacy: “A token of the affectionate remembrance of the Santee Women for Mary Hinman,” all of it in caps.

It’s worth a trip just to read it.

Some Santees left their Nebraska reservation for the big bend of the Sioux River in what would become Flandreau, South Dakota. And when the Episcopalians built their first church in 1867, they came without their pastor/dreamer, who was embroiled in scandals, sexual and financial, a recital of sins that, even though unproved, still make you weep.

What little can be known of Mary—what’s there on the cemetery stone and here in an old almost forgotten chapel--is almost enough to make me pull weeds from the day lilies, maybe scrape and paint that patchy front door, get rid of that noose-like electrical cord, and, on a ladder, straighten the akimbo cross above the door.

I wish the world would know more about Mary Hinman's love, but that’s not about to happen. Truth is, I'd settle for making sure the good folks of Flandreau, South Dakota, know what kind of treasure stands right there among 'em. That's not likely to happen either.

Sometimes the very best we can do is something akin to that akimbo cross.

__________________________ 

Variations on this story have appeared here before, but this version is what is recorded here  http://www.kwit.org/post/akimbo-cross .

--and available here, through Amazon, in a newly published collection of stories--Small Wonders: A Museum of Missouri River Stories. 

Kids in trouble

During my college days--what now seems eons into the past--troubled kids seemed as clearly understood as they were recognizable. If you wanted to keep kids on the straight-and-narrow, you went on the lookout for smokin' and drinkin' and carryin' on--with "carryin' on" generally connoting the calisthenics that happened at night in parked cars. "Nothing good ever happens after twelve" was a parental rule-of-thumb. 

If, like me, you went to a Christian college, generally there were other stone tablets full of no-nos, like dancing and a host of Sabbath indiscretions, most of which campus authorities claimed led to smokin' and drinkin' and carryin' on. Tough kids weren't hard to identify. 

Things change. According to an alarming essay in yesterday's New York Times, "It’s Life or Death’: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens," those sins of o'er are on the wain. By ye olde standards, kids should be doing just fine: there's less early pregnancy, less drug use, and more attention to education. It's true.

“By many markers, kids are doing fantastic and thriving," says Candice Rogers, a psychologist at Cal-Irvine. "Young people are more educated; less likely to get pregnant, use drugs; less likely to die of accident or injury.” 

Behaviors that once gave parents over to premature graying appear less frequent and of less consequence. Kids are incredibly good, a change anyone my age can't help but see if he or she'd been aboard any Christian college campus for the last twenty or thirty years. College students at my alma mater are not particularly bad or  naughty. The truth is, they're really good.

"But there are these really important trends in anxiety, depression, and suicide that stop us in our tracks," Professor Rogers says. "We need to figure it out,. . .it's life or death for these kids."

It's all social media, people say, but the research isn't at all conclusive. Horrible things are said, horrible things happen on line, but wonderful things happen too. It would be nice to be able to blame the problems researchers are finding on one solitary cause, but our lives' dilemmas are always more complex than conspiracy theories corral you into believing. 

Kids get less sleep today, less exercise, and less in-person time with friends. I met a couple who spent two stints, a decade apart, living as dorm parents at a Christian college in Michigan. They claimed that creating community wasn't difficult twenty years ago, but when they returned, the new and all-encompassing pose was students carrying books in one hand and staring at their phones in the other. Their lives are different.

Some propose that anxiety and depression are something of a fad--you know, "everybody's doing it"? Perhaps, experts say, but a definite rising tide of hospital stays for attempted suicide is impossible to ignore. 

What's more--and what's even more worrisome--is that today the emotional problems all around show themselves at a younger age: we're talking about middle school, junior high. Puberty is occurring earlier, a time when the chemical mix in the body's own chemistry creates all kinds of explosions. When that happens to even younger kids, there's going to be a mess.

It's a whole new world out there now, this old man says, and if there's one major takeaway from the rise in kids who abuse themselves, who cut their own flesh or sentence themselves to horrors no one dreamed of a couple of decades ago, it's this: reasons are complex. 

Changes this immense in the way we live--in the way our kids do--don't occur for one solitary reason or simply because of some jerk's villainy. If the Times story is right--and the facts are there!--then we can't successfully analyze those problems we're facing by taking aim at a couple of shiny tin cans. 

It's a long article, but it's worth reading. Have a look here. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Wanting

“I shall not want” Psalm 1:2

My friend Diet Eman, who spent more than anyone’s fair share of time in a concentration camp in the occupied Netherlands during World II, could not forget a time every day when the job description of the guards in the prison changed significantly: instead of beating up on the inmates, the guards had to keep inmates from beating up on themselves.

Food. There was so little of it in prison, that when what little of it emerged, the guards stood by closely. She describes those moments in Things We Couldn’t Say:

The only time they watched us closely was when we got our bread because resentments could grow and tempers flare. If you were assigned the duty of cutting margarine, you had to be very careful that all the lumps were exactly the same size. Margarine was all we had—no jam, no marmalade, no nothing—just bread and a little pad of margarine. You had to be very careful slicing it because the others would watch very closely to be sure that no one pad was any thicker than the other. If one slice would have been a bit thicker chunk of margarine, there would be bickering for sure; when you’re hungry, such bickering comes easily.

I don’t need to document the extremes to which good human beings will go when hungry. Reason gets tossed like cheap wrapping paper in the face of real human need.

I’ve never been that hungry. Neither have my parents, although, during the Great Depression, they came much closer than I ever did. My mother remembers my grandfather, a squat big-shouldered blacksmith, crying at supper because neither he nor his farmer customers had any money and he didn’t know where his next dollar was coming from. My father, whose father was a preacher, remembers his parent’s cupboards being filled only by the largesse of his congregation.

In my life, “I shall not want” seems a given. Don’t even have to ask. I don’t need a God, after all—I’ve got money. In the many years of our marriage, our economic problems have arisen not because of lack of money but because of too much: if our kids need something—even our adult kids—should we buy it for them, or should we make sure they learn some basic lessons in economics? Sometimes—often—our hearts lean one way, our heads the other. Most the time we don’t know what to do.

Of course, I just now horribly misspoke. We have money all right, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need God. We can have the nation’s finest filet mignon (we live in beef country, after all) every weekend if we’d like; what’s more, Sioux County has the finest pork loin in the world. Food is no problem.

But we want—good Lord, do we want. We want our kids happy. We want finally--please, Lord!--an end of the dying in Ukraine. 

 We want to ease into the pratfalls of old age. 

 We want a cottage in Minnesota. 

“I shall not want” may be the most audacious claim in all of scripture because, good Lord, do we ever. Good Lord, do what you can to help us not to.

The Million Dollar Corner

The Million Dollar Corner

There's no sign up anywhere, near or far, but every last soul in the region knows the intersection of the two major two-lane-ers in the county--highways 75 and 10--is, was, and has been for as long as anyone can remember, the "Million Dollar Corner." It's lays out there on a low plain all by its lonesome, closest burg is Maurice, three miles south. It's an ordinary, but busy northwest Iowa intersection. Once upon a time a gas station tried to make a go of it on the southeast corner, but successive floods likely dampened enthusiasm for people trying to turn a buck there, no matter that Million Dollar Corner handles as much traffic as any corner in the county. 

The nickname, if you listen closely, has a sneer to it, as if some local despised government spending and assessed the whole corner to be a lousy "boondoggle," even though that long quarter-mile bridge, north and south, was paid for by the Great Northern, not Washington big spenders. 

Years ago, a man named Harold Aardema, of the Doon Press, told me the corner was called that because a tragedy, death by drowning, took place there and would never be forgotten, a father and son swept away in a flood where there shouldn't have been one, right there at the corner, where the only source of water is a creek that barely whispers most of the year, the West Branch of the Floyd River, of Sargent Floyd fame.  

On Saturday, September 27, 1926, Deputy Auditor M. J. Van Wyk reported the official rainfall at Hull, Iowa, to be 14 inches. Boyden's Supervisor Kamminga claimed a barrel, empty before the storm, had two-feet of water in it when the rains finally quit. 

Somewhere near Lebanon, a harried one-room school teacher kept the kids inside while around the building water rose into a roiling horror. All night she held out, while the kids' folks kept everything lit at a nearby farm place where the whole lot of them waited prayerfully for their children's deliverance. One young man, a boy of DeVries, gallant as anything, was lost, his wagon swept away when he tried to get out to the school. Like the teacher, "little Miss Mouw," the boy of DeVries was 18 years old.

But the story old Aardema told was of a father and son, a man named Terpstra, from Hospers, on his way to Sioux Center. Any local will tell you that his routing decision makes no sense, then or now. Hospers is a pure straight-edge east from Sioux Center, but Terpstra and his son had to angle far out of the way to avoid the flood waters that eventually took both dad and his boy. 

Terpstra was the jeweler in Hospers, well-known, a businessman, on his way to pick up his wife from all day Sioux Center church doings, a missions gala. He'd turned north just a bit from Million Dollar Corner, when his tires went down into an invisible washout created by rushing water. He and his son, just seven years old, climbed out of the car, even got to the roof, which made the tragedy public. People on the banks of the raging West Branch saw it happen. The bodies weren't found until they showed up a couple days later, mud-laden, downstream.

But newspaper accounts back then locate the sadness right there at "Million Dollar Corner," which means that intersection had its widely held nickname already then, in 1926, almost a century ago.

Then why am I retelling that whole sad story? Why not just let those tears evaporate into the miasma of a foggy ancient past? Maybe because I'd like to think that a million dollars worth of bridge-building and some heavy-duty dirt work all around the intersection was no boondoggle, wasn't wasted taxes at all, wasn't wasted anything.

Today, there's a gigantic crane over the north end of that long railroad bridge. You can't miss it. Some kind of repair is going on, if for no other reason than to keep the BNSF freights that pass the intersection from some messy derailment.

Besides, I shouldn't have to tell the descendants of all those Dutch folks that cleanliness is next to Godliness, that order is better than chaos, that being ready for some torrential downpour is better than simply letting it happen again.

I like old Aardema's suggestion--that the place is named after construction that went on after that deadly flood, even though historically it's not true. I like the idea of remembering because Mark Twain got it right long ago: "The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes."

Every time I come over the hill just east of Million Dollar Corner, I honestly don't mind being reminded that once upon a time. . .well, you know.

The Pinkish Origins of Storytelling--iii

 

(continued from yesterday)

The scar has occasioned a few opportunities for laughs, not all of which came at my expense. One of the highlights of an American boy's late teens back then, had to come on or around your eighteenth birthday when you registered for the draft. Naturally, an important event like that is often discussed, and long before I ever went into the Selective Service Office, I was well aware that among other questions, one of the questions the lady behind the desk would ask was a uniquely personal and, at least to an eighteen year old, a question about identifiable scars. Three of us, born around the same time, went in together and cooked up a joke.

When it was my turn for questioning, I made sure the conscientious secretary couldn't miss the blazing sixteen-year-old mark shining on the side of my face.

"Yes, and Jim," she said, “--have any identifiable scars?" Didn’t even bother looking up.

I put my hand to my chin. "I don't think so."

"Oh, you must have some scar somewhere. . ." 

A perfectly plausible pause.

"I can't think of any."

Then, a little help from my friends. “Oh, Schaap, come on—you got to have a scar someplace.”

“Man, I really don’t think so.”

We wondered how long it would take for the her to become frustrated enough to take one daring step beyond politeness. “Think real hard,” she said, “—a scar somewhere on your body or on your face?”

Guys helped out. “You got a scar above your eye where you took an elbow in basketball,” one of them said.

She rolled her eyes. “You must have something more obvious than that.”

The gig was up, so I gave in. “Oooooohhhh, how about this little one on my cheek?”

 Heavy sigh of relief. Everybody was happy.

I was 40 maybe, maybe older, when going through customs at the Toronto airport, I was waylaid because I had a box of books along to try to sell at a couple of readings I had set up in Ontario, where people buy books. Books always were a pain—taxes, sales, even prices—“what are they worth?” someone would say. Those were difficult questions that required answers. It wasn’t unexpected that the first customs agent would point me in another direction, where I’d have to suffer through further questioning.

I went along with the program, tried to explain that assessing dollars-and-cents was tough when we were talking about my books. And then, of course, there was the Canadian taxes. . .

“Maybe you ought to see the guy in the desk in the next room,” the second customs agent told me, pointing. This was a level I normally didn’t achieve.

The two of us were alone now. I was a long way out of the flow of traffic. I knew I wasn’t in trouble—that wasn’t it. The question was, were they going to let me haul the books into Canada or not.

“So,” the third guy says. He’s sitting behind a wide and old desk. There’s a light on above his head. I felt as if I was part of a crime family. “You’ve got these books. . .” He looked over the report that came with me, then at me. “So how’d you get that scar anyway?” he said.

I was gutsy. I’ll admit it. I smiled, big-time. I told him I’d be glad to tell him the story, if he’d admit that my having a scar had absolutely nothing to do with what he needed to know. “My scar’s got nothing to do with this,” I told him, as if I was sharing a joke.

And, nodding, he took it that way. He flicked his head, smiling, all he needed to do to let me be on my way.

I sometimes shudder to think of what incredible stories may have shot through the minds of some people who never told me what they were thinking.

People—including my mother--have told me a hundred times that I could get that scar taken off by a process called "sanding," I guess. No reason for me to carry it anymore, not with modern medicine.

But it's still here. I'll take it to the grave, I'm sure. And thereafter? If there's a choice in such things, I'd just as soon keep it. I wouldn't know myself without it.

Tonight--Sioux Center!!

 

The Pinkish Origins of Storytelling -- ii

Yesterday's opening featured the event--just exactly how I got this rip down the cheek. This morning's post begins the long aftermath. There's far more here than I ever needed to say, I'm sure. Bear with me. 

~*~*~*~

In moments, I was long ago told, both parents and grandparents were at there the sight of the accident, bemoaning the bloody face I wore." I was almost two, so I started bawling. My momma told me I was going to be all right but we needed to visit the doctor, although I'm not sure I knew what a doctor was.

I’m told I had quite a few gashes over my face, but one was both deep and wide, running the up my face, left side. Hence, me and Cain.

I've always simply assumed the doctor failed to sew the big slice shut quite as tightly as he should have, so the scar, even as it healed, remained visibly wide.

Scars turn white, right? Not this one. For years, this three-inch-er I carry remained steadfastly crimson and thus came to dominate first impressions, made me look, well, apprehensive. 

But for me, of course, the carrier, the scar became second nature, so much a part of me that I long ago forgot I had it. But whenever we moved to a new place I remembered. Or else when we met chatty new people. Some few blurt it out--generally old folks, medical frequent flyers who take note and then rehearse their own old surgeries and quite baldly expose their own battle scars to empathize, I suppose.

"Hello. I'm Jim--Jim Schaap, originally from Wisconsin.”

"Bill. Bill Sanderson--where the hell did you get that scar? Want to see mine?”

It's rarely a question. You learn to live with their revelations. When I was younger, I avoided the flashing by simply making a game out of the answer, telling him or her what I imagined they'd like to hear.

“Well, I was down in Chicago one night. . . " You know, some horror with a whacked off beer bottle. 

The first basemen of a small college in South Dakota once asked me a what the heck had happened top me the moment I reached first.

"Got it in a little fight," I told him.

"Oh, yeah?” he says, begging the story to go on.

I had his full attention when, just like that, the chucker picked me off. Never saw it coming. I wondered what the first basemen used on other guys.

As I grew up, the storied means by which I had acquired the scar changed. When I was a little boy, some moms would always ask mine if a cat was the culprit. Mom always felt bad about that. She hates cats. Never really bothered me.

Early adolescence was a strange time. People didn’t know what to ask since it was too early for a fight and too late for a cat. Besides talking about pimples was hard enough for a kid that age. I didn't need the scar.

One day in the seventh grade, we opened our books to a story in our reading class titled, "Old Scarface", about an old whale I think. I never looked up from my book for the whole hour so I didn't see the stares. Sure enough, I knew they were there.

In high school, I was among the first to have a sideburn, even though I hadn't touched a blade. My shoulders broadened, and I began to grow into a normal human being except for that orange-ish ugliness running down the left side of my face. Sooner or later, most of the kids I knew heard the true story, but when we'd meet new kids, some lusty Romeo would say, "What the heck did you do to her?"

Thus began my life as a story teller. In college it was most often a full-fledged barroom brawl, but the "passionate lover" was still occasionally referenced to late- night bull sessions. Bigots claimed it had to be racial. Outdoorsmen, had me chasing a some monster buck through naked winter foliage. Girls, well, why let the cat out of the bag; half of romance was intrigue and the other half was deception anyway. Besides, when I was sixteen or so, I asked myself, who'd really want to tell the real story? I was two, my sister was five. . .

That's lame.

(still more tomorrow, if you can handle it. . .)

Tonight--Orange City!!!

 

The Pinkish Origins of Storytelling -- i

Forgive the size here. I've been blogging for 17 years or so, but I don't remember ever using a shot of myself like this or any other. This is me and I'm huge. My friend Jo Alberda took it at Sandy Hollow, when I needed something good for a book titled CRC Family Portrait. That book came out in 1982, forty years ago, which makes the me, here, 33 years old. I landed it here this morning because I'm going to run an ancient essay that's even older--going on 50--an essay about that scar, the one you can't miss. 

I found the scarface essay when dumping old files, which is not a fun job. It's a little essay I thought I could be funny enough to sell. When push came to shove, I never submitted it anywhere; but I was happy to find it because I'm wrapping up a writing life by collecting things that, together, I hope constitute a memoir, my life story. I want there to be something around, something I don't have from my own great-grandparents on either side, something about how they lived. 

From before I was two years old, I've lived with a mean scar down my left cheek--that one. To those who know me, that's not news, and me? --I don't know life without it. 

So we're out there at Sandy Hollow, and Jo is directing me how to sit, where to look, how to hold my head, you know. "Now turn a bit more toward the sun--I've got to get that scar," she says, wielding her SLR. 

I hadn't even thought of the scar. I remember her directions because she most certainly did. 

That portrait, up top, long ago, found its place on the book's back cover.

~*~*~*~

When Cain murdered Abel, God planted a mark on his forehead to signify that he had sinned grievously. The mark was to stay with him for the rest of his born days so everyone would identify Cain as, well, undesirable.

I don't remember doing anything quite so horrendous as murder before my second birthday. I may have wet a few diapers and kept Mom and Dad from sleeping, but nothing quite so out of the ordinary for any run-of-the-mill year-old kid. Regardless, I, too have borne a mark that has and will stay with me for however long death may tarry.

In January, 1950, soon after Christmas, our family made a trip to Grandpa's house to celebrate the holiday season. As usual, Grandma made sure she had all the seasonal goodies prepared, the new toys set out in plain view for the grandkids. Among them was a colorful, new pin-ball machine, not a big one found in pool halls, but a smaller game designed to set on the floor. As far as I can remember, this particular model looked much like any other toy pin-ball machine, except by some genius of manufacturing, the toy-makers had neglected to lay glass over the playing surface, leaving the metal pegs exposed.

That pin-ball game dominated our attention for the afternoon, and only when we ran to the holiday table did the marbles rest in the tray at the bottom of the machine.

Let me make this clear: I always liked my sister. She was and is three years older than me, and she was a girl, but she never bothered me in any ways other than any usual older sister might.

After supper she went back to the living room floor and resumed play on the delightful little game, placing it next to the Christmas tree so as to get a little additional light, then bent over on all fours in front, creating an inviting little horse to any year-old cowboy. I hopped on, decided to make a game of her.

She didn’t consent to the horseplay. She wriggled and shook at first, kind of half-heartedly, then told me to get off. Truth be told, my weight wasn't that substantial—I was not yet two--to take her attention off the marbles zigzagging down through those posts. When she decided she'd had enough, she lifted her lets like a rodeo bronc and tossed me off. Thus began my life as a marked man.

I made a perfect one point landing in the field of posts set into the wonderful Christmas toy, face first. Those nasty little posts did their thing, or, so I am told, because when I came up for air my face looked like Antietam.

Early adolescence was a strange time. People didn’t know what to ask since it was too early for a fight and too late for a cat. Besides talking about pimples was hard enough for a kid that age, how much worse could it be some poor kid about a big scar like mine. 

(more sadness tomorrow)

A Quarter-Million Supplications

There was enough sparring between the generals just about then. Although the Allies knew nothing about it, Hitler had determined that the only way to win the war was to attack to take on the forces crushing him and his armies. Hence, he assembled his generals and told them his grand plan--to take back the port at Antwerp but an huge attack along an eighty-mile front. And, oh yes, if they as much as whispered a word of his plan before it would unfold, the penalty for their leak would be death.  No one thought him kidding.

Meanwhile, on the "ghost front," there just simply wasn't much action, as the western European world turned into winter.  After the beachhead at Normandy and the fights that went on, Germany backing out of occupied France, the whole front went into a stall. Winter was coming, and much of the Allied fighting force was recovering from really tough warfare in France. There was a lull, which is why the front, people claimed, was "a ghost front."

There'd never been much love between Field Marshall Montgomery and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike was gracious man; Monty a peacock who believed that he, obviously, should have been the single field general commanding all the Allied troops. A ton of Yank soldiers felt it was Monty who'd destroyed so many lives in Holland, in and around Arnhem, when a bridge too far wasn't the only miscalculation. Montgomery was too blame cocky to admit or even believe he was to blame. Yank soldiers despised him.

Patton kept his nose out of the mess. Popular with his men, Patton was thinking of his own troops, particularly his armored units, because constant rain had softened the ground, made it almost unmanageable for his tanks. 

And the rain just kept falling. It was mid-December, 1944, and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were still coming into Europe for what most considered to be a drawn-out war that would be over--the Allies believed--just a few months, maybe even weeks. What neither Monty nor Ike had considered was about to happen anyway--the Battle of Bulge, the biggest battle of the war was about to commence.

Maybe for the first time, General George Patton got religion. Damned rain had to stop, had to quit, had to be done. If his troops were to manage any efficacy against the Huns, they had to have good solid ground, dry ground, beneath their tracks.

So he got religion. He got ahold of the closest chaplain he could find, a man named James O'Neill. "You got a good prayer for weather?" he said. Didn't ask, said.

Chaplain said he'd look and call back. Nope. Nowhere. A prayer to end the rain? he must have said to himself. "He wants a prayer to stop the rain." He knew better than to call back empty-handed, so Chaplain O'Neill wrote one, this one: 

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle, Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen. 

For the record, Patton thought that Chaplain O'Neill's prayer would do just fine, people say because the moment he heard it, he told the chaplain to have 250,000 copies printed. "Be sure every man in the Third Army gets one," he commanded. And then he told O'Neill that they must get everyone praying. "We must ask God to stop these rains. These rains are the margin that holds defeat or victory."

The story goes this way: When the chaplain saw Patton again, the General said, "Well, Padre, our prayers worked. I knew they would." And then, it is said, he quite appreciatively smacked the padre's helmet with his riding crop.

You ever wonder what incredible range God Almighty must field when he listens to our prayers, all of them? A gadzillion stories every hour of every day. . .and more.

Amazing grace.

Sunday Morning Meds--One snowy Easter morn

So an ex-student claims he's thinking of becoming either a Roman Catholic or a Pentecostal, an odd choice for a kid from my good Protestant stock maybe, but somehow understandable--and besides, somewhere on God's green earth there must be a contingent of spirit-filled Catholics. What's Amy Comey Barrett?--isn't she some kind of Catholic hybrid? 

When it comes to religion, things of faith, there's nothing new under the sun. It's pretty much all been done; it's just that we haven't done 'em.

Most Sunday worships, a friend of mine goes high church with the Anglicans, but when he gets the chance he swings across town and bangs his guitar in a praise band, among folks happy to have him, if only for his guitar.

An old couple in Michigan--I read this yesterday--just got married. They were sweethearts sixty-some years ago, the newspaper said, but she broke it off because she was Catholic and he was Christian Reformed and never the twain should meet, or whatever, back then. She couldn't spend her life with a Protestant, she determined, so there were tears and each went on to have his or her own family. She raised nine kids. When the spouses were gone, sixty years later, the old guy went after her again, as if she'd always been the real thing, his Rachel, you might say.

The two of them are happy. I'd guess the strict differences don't carry much weight when you're eighty years down the road. Transubstantiation?--sure, whatever. The story says they took a trip to Europe when they were celebrating their birthdays, sleeping in the same room, I'd guess--hardly a big deal if you're eighty. He asked her to marry him at a restaurant atop the Eiffel Tower. I'm not making this up.

Somewhere along the line did they lose their faith or did it just grow? Talk amongst yourselves.

This morning it's Easter. All week long it's been Holy Week, Easter Week. Started with Palm Sunday, then Maundy Thursday, tomorrow's Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and, up on the main stage, this morning it's Easter Sunday. Amid the week's extravagant religious wardrobe, in my circles M,T,W go pretty much naked, I guess. Maybe next year.

Seven years ago now, SCOTUS ruled on arguments on same-sex marriage (should that be upper case or not?), and Christianity Today's on-line edition worried with this headlined: "If the Supreme Court legalizes Same-Sex Marriage, What Next?"

Tough question for evangelicals, who have a penchant for demonizing the sympathizers. 

Somehow, given my guitar-pickin' friend, my ex-student who wants so badly to experience Christ, and those two old lovers renewing vows they never took suggests that legalizing same sex marriage won't mean the end of faith. Faith outdoes Heinz in its many varieties, and there's more options, it seems, every week.

Mother Teresa, a nun who may well have been the most honored woman in the world, whose ministries on the streets of Calcutta made her, literally, a saint, spent long and dark decades of her life believing "the bride of Christ." MT thought herself painfully abandoned by the Jesus she wanted to be. She spent decades wading in deep thick doubt.

Still, "Let the people eat you up," she told her Sisters. She didn't want to be like him. She didn't want simply to serve him or only to do his work. She wanted to die to the sin that was herself, so badly did she want to be one with the Lord Jesus, even though she believed he wouldn't have her. For years, she thought He'd left her totally alone--all of this behind a curtain.

Once upon a time, my mother had a Pentecostal friend who could and did, quite successfully I guess, speak in tongues. My mother said she wanted to experience Christ like that, so this friend told her that glossolalia wasn't all that difficult. "Just open your mouth and let it come," she said. My mother opened her mouth--it didn't come, and I'll never forget that face as she described her attempts.

But there were no words, not even mumbling. Didn't work. No tongues flowed from her soul, and she felt somehow abandoned.

It's Holy Week for all kinds of seekers, me included, all kinds of lookers and shoppers, men and women hungry for some kind of spiritual fulfillment. We're all looking really. The only ones I don't know if I trust are those who richly claim to have found it.

I just asked Google about the Easter weather forecast. Google said "Snow," which means it's not going to be the Easter of my dreams. Somewhere not far away right now, I'm sure, people are determining whether it's worth it to be outside for the Easter sunrise service. 

How do you make sense of all of that religion?

We do what we can, I suppose. We look around and do what we can. Holy Week is always there. And He is, even when the best of us can't help but believe He's not, even when we don't or can't speak in tongues.

Once upon a time, shockingly, He walked out of a sealed tomb and left death behind for all of us. That's the plain and simple truth. That's the only story worth telling.

Have a wonderful Easter, no matter what the weather. No matter how cold, how snowy, how dreary. He walked away and left death behind in an open sepulchre.

He arose. That's where we're at this morning and every morning. He arose. Hallelujah! Christ arose!

Morning Thanks--Good Friday

Among the gospels' most unforgettable stories is the one about that wretched Peter, who whacks off an soldier's ear in a showy defense of Jesus, then hangs his Savior out to dry not all that much later, when three people finger him as having been one of the Messiah's sidekicks. No, he says, no way. He flat out lies. Flat out lies. Denial, denial, denial.

And he does it, shockingly, after being told he'd do exactly that, after having the whole horrible night described for him by Jesus himself in no uncertain terms, after looking into Christ's own crystal-ball.

"No, no, no--never met the guy."

Our preacher reminded us of that story, reminded us how sweet it would have been to be able to watch Jesus eyeball Peter-of-the-Forked-Tongue just as the morning rooster let go the promised catcall. I wish the gospel writers had drawn in that scene.

But even my wish is tainted with Adam's fall, because the first dozen reactions I figure Jesus just might do--nod, wink, shake his bloody head, stare reprovingly, snarl, scream, shed a tear, or point a finger at him and say "gotcha"--come from my own human playbook. They're what I'd do if I were Jesus.

But then, of course, Christ is everything we're not. Ain't it the truth?

Because once I've run through the whole gamut of human emotions, once I've created the scene in a dozen different mocking ways--Jesus looking over at Peter, the cock crowing behind them--I can't help but realize that it takes real work for me to realize what face Jesus would show him, real work I can't accomplish on my own. No I-told-you-so stuff. No spite. No rolling eyes. None of that is in the divine playbook.

What he'd do, if he had it handy, is offer Peter the very cup of blessing.

That particular reaction wasn't high on my list, but, through the darkened haze of my own sin, I know--I just know--WWJD. I just know because He's everything I'm not.

And for that plain and divine truth, this Good Friday, I offer my morning thanks.

Sietze, nostalgia, and principle

I'm quite sure I didn't leave them an option. I sent them off to the college on a Saturday afternoon for a performance of Purpaleanie, a stage play put together by a friend of mine, Verne Meyer, based on the book of the same name by another friend, Stan Wiersma. Years before, when the play and the book were hot stuff, Purpaleanie had scored big-time with me and most everyone I knew. I loved it. 

Our kids were maybe ten years or so out of college by then, and Dordt was celebrating its fiftieth birthday by staging of a bold and endearing CRC classic. Our children and their out-of-town cousins, back then, went off to the play together--at my insistence, I'm sure.

They came back grim and unmoved. "I didn't really get it," my daughter said. She winced, as if fearing her father's displeasure. 

Stan would not have been surprised, I suppose. After all, the poems in that book put evaluative questions of what is real and what is phony front-and-center and asks his readers to decide questions he may well not have wanted to answer himself, questions that probe differences between "the old way," "the new way," and "the right way," the genre of questions we still assess and likely always will.

My kids came home a bit ashamed of their boredom--and probably of their father.

It's Good Friday, but I can't help thinking today of one of those Wiersma creations, especially a long one with a cumbersome title, "That Stone on Five Easters: 1946, 1947, 1954, 1969, ????"

Sietze, the book's protagonist, takes organ lessons from a feisty woman from the American Reformed Church, where she plays "The Hallelujah Chorus" on Easter morning, followed by "Christ the Lord is Risen Today." Sietze's Middleburg CRC insists on the traditionally cumbersome Psalm 118. She tells him that when he gets to be church organist, he's got to put a stop to playing that old dreary psalm on Easter. "Your preacher is well-meaning," she says, "just not quite with it about Easter music."

A year later, Sietze's at the organ on Easter, so he does as his teacher instructed. He tells his preacher they should worship in English on Easter, just so he can play and they can sing the lively "Christ the Lord is Risen Today."

Dominie loses it in peculiarly CRC fashion: "She is an ex-Calvinist who has given up her Calvinism for provincial reasons," he says, of the teacher, at which she rages back a few days later: "You Christian Reformed people all think you're God-on-wheels." What's more, she says the preacher is "a pharisaical whited sepulcher." She tells Sietze he should get a new organ teacher. "And tell your pastor that as for him and his congregation, they can all sit on tacks." I'm sure that meme went viral.

That takes care of the first two years of the poem. The third, 1954, puts Sietze in a military uniform playing the organ for an Easter service at a chapel in still-occupied Japan. Half a world from the old dominee, he gets to play the forceful and triumphant "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," but when he looks around, he realizes that no one is singing but the choir, that a sad and shallow commitment he'd never felt before had simply brushed off seriousness in that worship service. Woefully, he admits he "felt nostalgia for Middleburg as I've never felt it, where a dwindling congregation would be singing 'De Steen Die door de tempelbouwers,'" Psalm 118.

That leaves only the last year of the title, 1969. Sietze is in the Netherlands at Easter, looking forward to singing Psalm 118 with truly traditional endearment, the way it was always sung at home in Middleburg. Instead, the opening hymn is--well, you guessed it--"Christ the Lord is Risen Today."

But that's not the end of the poem. 

My parents used to think Sietze Buning's Banner poetry carried a smidgeon too much spotten, that he was too obviously making fun of the old ways. The old ways, to them, were, well, not sacred but just about, mind you. They read him faithfully, but occasionally clicked their tongues, sometimes more than once. 

But Stan Wiersma sins far beyond spotten in this seven-page poem when he leaves a long final section in the Dutch language and provides, startlingly, no translation, no hint at what the Dutch preacher, a real dominee, told Sietze when Sietze lets him know that he had been looking forward to hearing Psalm 118 at Easter Service.

If you have to, run the whole speech through Google translation sometime. It's worth it. The dominee raises a finger, it seems, and, in typical Dutch fashion, gets in Sietze's face, telling him that wanting Psalm 118 at Easter is little more than nostalgia on his part. It's not principle, not at all. 

If you read the Dutch, you come to understand that the dominee is missing an eye. He had been arrested, Sietze tells us, during the Nazi occupation, when he was imprisoned by the SS. In the years of his absence, with no real sense of the future, his spouse turned to drinking. That's all explained in the Dutch language. You've got to figure meaning out for yourself. 

But what Sietze takes away from coffee with the dominee that morning at the Leidseplein is that, given the preacher's own experience, his deep and personal suffering during the occupation, Sietze's longing for the old ways in Middleburg was, really, as the dominee has said, not principal at all but warm-hearted nostalgia.

The last line of  the entire seven-page poem, in Dutch, is the dominee's personal concession. "Personally," he says, "I like Psalm 118." It's a touching moment in what, in some moments, seems a comic-book of a poem. 

Yesterday, our children sent a video of their four-year-old at day-care. They were having an easter egg hunt, and Olivia was having a ball, carrying a bag to take home all the loot, running around, like all the others, retrieving what she could. Easter eggs.

I remember Good Fridays when I was a boy. Our church was downtown back then, and what I'll never forget is the ghost sense of the day because everything was closed, noon to three--grocery stores, meat market, Knotty Pine, Grandpa's Mobil station. It was all shut down. "For the hours when Jesus was on the cross," my mom explained. The whole town shut down. 

Nostalgia. Not principle. Maybe. Hence that row of "????."

I don't need to say, I suppose, that unlike my kids, I get it. Fifteen years later each of them with their own kids, my guess is they do too.

And here, for Sietze and for Easter, is three short minutes of Psalm 118.

Boarding Schools

This lowly place is what's left of the Pipestone Indian School, once a boarding school for lots of Yanktons and Ojibwa from the area. That man walking up to the front is Ted Charles, an old friend, a Navajo, who had a close, close friend who couldn't bear to say the word "pipestone" because, or so he told Ted, of what had happened to him there at boarding school.

Others had other reactions. I've got a book on the shelf behind me written by a man, a Native American, whose rendition of his school years at Pipestone Indian School takes great joy in childish pranks and all kinds of mischievousness, something akin to almost any middle-school kid today or yesterday.

These days, of course, boarding schools such as this one have impossibly horrible reputations, which they've earned because their most righteous acts were still impossibly foul. Boarding schools were aimed precisely at cultural genocide, at destroying Native cultures. They created devastating effects. 

Consider this man, Plenty Horses, a Lakota from Pine Ridge, who spent five years at Carlisle School, then returned home to South Dakota in late 1890 and was swept up in the Ghost Dance that preceded the Massacre at Wounded Knee and the skirmishes that flourished on the reservation in its wake. 

 On January 7, 1891, eight days after the slaughter, Plenty Horses took sure aim at Lt. Edward Casey as Casey walked back to his horse after an hour-long talk and shot him through the back of the head, the last white soldier to die in the Sioux Indian wars.

“I was an outcast,” Plenty Horses told people later. “I was no longer an Indian.” His seemingly cold-blooded murder of Lt. Casey, a story grippingly told by Roger L. Di Silvestro in In the Shadow of Wounded Knee, can and often is at least partially explained by the identity problems Plenty Horses faced back home in Pine Ridge. After all, shooting a man in the back of the head would not have given him standing, traditionally, as a warrior among his own his own people. “In the world of his own culture,” Di Silvestro says, “Plenty Horses had lost his way, and in his attempt to win a place for himself there, he had blundered."

Simply stated, the boarding school movement in American Indian education collapsed upon its own brash and racist foundation when, clearly, its mission was not met: the vast majority of students didn’t “assimilate” with either the dominant white culture, nor the Native world, the reservation system, into which they’d been born.

The entire boarding school movement was a means to an end—a way of dealing with the devastation which occurred when millions of white people determined the North American continent was empty land, there—and theirs—for the taking. The bloody and shocking depredations which occurred along famous overland routes during the 19th century occurred because white people wanted Native land, and took it.

As reprehensible as that idea might seem to white people today—it seemingly didn’t bother us much then—what is painfully clear a century later is that, in taking their land, white people also took away their culture, which is to say their way of life.

Fog of War

Normandy was only the beginning, of course, what happened at and on at Utah Beach was the trailer of a story that would run throughout Europe for almost a year, bringing immense devastation and millions of deaths--and, of course, on the other side of the ledger, sweet liberation. Each action had its own players, its own setting, its own peculiar plot twists. Just off the beaches, the bloody battle at St. Lo was fought within the ancient hedgerows, what we might call fence lines, that stood in the fields for centuries and therefore sprouted trees, heavier cover than field grasses that made tanks of little use.

But the Allies moved on, liberating France and finally stepping ever into Germany itself. For the U. S. First Army alone, the Battle of Huntgen Forest (the longest battle in American military history--September to December, 1944) cost 33,000 killed and wounded; some claim estimates could stretch to almost twice as many.

All those lives were impacted, as was the German countryside, of course, because the Allies wanted to get to Berlin and end the killing and get the peace at last. The first step was the ancient, historical city of Aachen, where none other than Charlemagne had created the Second Reich. The battle for Aachen went street to street, house to house.

Now again we're at war. No American troops are directly involved, taking fire or dodging missiles; but make no mistake, we're at war. People are suffering and dying for no apparent reason but the delusion of one horrifyingly powerful little man--not Hitler, but some of the players in this death drama are easily recognizable.

The Nazis promised the nation that the fight for Aachen would not let up, that they would defend the city bravely and the enemy would be vanquished. But when it became clear that Aachen would fall, Gerald Wilck, the commander of Germany's troops, did exactly what Hitler had demanded would never happen, he officially surrendered the city of Charlemagne on October 21. Eventually, block after block fell into Allied hands, but only after fierce hand-to-hand fighting.

It may surprise you to know--as it did me--that not all of Hitler's military brass loved the man, der Fuhrer. Once Wilck was captured, he told Allied commanders that it was known far and wide in the corps that Hitler's closest advisors were adept liars. Hitler wouldn't hear the truth, and because he wouldn't, he couldn't and therefore didn't. The failed attempt on his life was largely the design of military who took note of too much madness to continue to follow the orders of a man whose mind was the definition of disorder. The only people Hitler trusted were those who told him only what he wanted to hear. Sound familiar?

A couple of school boys picked up a rifle and started firing in the direction of the Allied troops. A German soldier grabbed that rifle away from them and ordered them gone. Nazi propaganda made the boys into heroes, but, ironically, fed into general German unease when the action of three little boys were contrasted with the massive Allied front. But then, the Nazis weren't skilled at irony. Their loudest advocates were true believers.

Wilck said Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler's chosen, probably used the story to tell Hitler that there was great reason for rejoicing since a new battalion had been created.

I've been reading about the Battle of the Bulge because of the odd juxtaposition of four people of my acquaintance who were part of that gigantic event, all of whom have or had indelible memories but none of whom were in a position to understand much at all of why it was they were there and what exactly was going on around them.

Meanwhile, we too are at war.

What my friend Diet Eman used to talk about was "the fog of war," the way in which war mists everything, makes truth a lie and exalts a lie into truth, makes killers heroes, sours our attention into hate, makes death somehow glorious.

I've always respected by Mennonite friends who are pacifists, but it's just not in me. There's just too much evil in the world.