Sunday Morning Meds--Those Who Take Refuge*

“The LORD helps them and delivers them; 

he delivers them from the wicked and saves them, 

because they take refuge in him.” Psalm 37:40

She was one of four African-Americans on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus that day in December—December 1, 1955, one of four African-Americans who were seated in a section of the bus that was something of a twilight zone, a place blacks could sit as long as there weren’t too many white passengers.

Hard as it is to believe today, the front of the bus was reserved for white people; the back was for blacks. In much of the American South, Jim Crow was still the law of the land in 1955.

She’d been working all day at the department store, and she was tired—physically tired; but she was also spiritually tired, her soul bruised by the treatment of her people, treatment she understood and experienced ever since she was old enough to understand the parameters of the racial divide in world in which she lived.

She and her husband were members of the local NAACP, active in civil rights cases. What she did that day—when she refused to give up her seat to a white man simply because he was white—may well have been spur-of-the-moment, but it wasn’t without context. “I don’t think I should have to stand up,” she told the bus driver, who was trying to get her to move. She stayed put because "I would have to know for once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen of Montgomery, Alabama." That’s what she told an interviewer a few months later. She knew what was at stake.

Her name was Rosa Parks, and, as I write, today she’ll be buried in Detroit, the city she called home since 1957. She goes to her grave as someone many call “the mother of racial integration” in America. Her story has become—and should be—as much an American myth as George Washington’s cherry-tree honesty or Ben Franklin’s penniless arrival in Philadelphia.

Three other African-Americans gave up their seats, in all likelihood, for good reasons—they stayed out of jail. A dozen white people didn’t think twice when she was removed from that bus. Maybe some of them never even looked up from their papers. None of them had any idea that race relations in their city and their nation were going to change, powered by a little lady’s refusal to leave her bus seat.

Few stories are as important in 20th century American history.

Today, at her funeral, Aretha Franklin will sing “How Great Thou Art,” Rosa Parks’s favorite hymn. It’s probably fair to say that most of America would join a choir today to sing those four words in tribute to Rose Parks—“Rosa, how great thou art.”

But Ms. Parks gave God all the raves. “I believe in church and my faith,” she wrote in Quiet Strength, “and that has helped to give me the strength and courage to live as I did.”

Last week Rose Parks died. Today she’ll be buried. But her life inspires millions. She’s a role model for racial justice, an authentic American hero, and a testimony to the truth of the words King David uses, as yet another promise, to end this long psalm about the comfort coming to those who seek shelter—as Rosa Parks did, in the bounty of God’s love.

________________________ 

*Rosa Parks died on October 24th, 2005. This meditation, like most others on Sundays, is taken from Sixty at Sixty. . . I'm now 74. 

The Schaap Outback

 

Here's our back yard--yesterday. I can't compute the number of hours my just birthday-ed wife has been out here, picking weeds, making sure everything's growing. The idea is to let it go "native" but tend it nonetheless, and tend it she does. 

Just so happens that right now, things out back are about as colorful as they get. I can't tell you what kind of joy it brings to my soul to look out here and walk out here--and into the acre of restored prairie I've been tending, while she manages the back yard. I'd tell you this is my kingdom, but in all seriousness I'm its thrall. 

This year, the very first year since we moved out here to the valley of the Floyd, we've got an abundance of milkweed--in fact, I've picked quite a bit. I know, I know--the monarchs aren't doing well because there isn't the ready supply there's been for centuries, but we've got more than our share. I'm always happy to spot a monarch--they're here, but not in abundance--but milkweed is popping up in clumps all over, and as much as I like them--and the monarchs they attract--they're something of a pest this year (and for the first time).

Last week I was bragging to my sister about how gorgeous our whole back acre is looking these days, during summer's glory. We've had plenty of rain, and heat that would be wearying if it weren't for those occasional showers--really beautiful growing weather. So what's out back right now is bright and colorful.

But it's not the flower shop. Native prairie is showy in its own quiet way, more reserved than a barrel full of annuals. Right now these guys are all over, in abundance this year, yellowing the place as if dawn's early light weren't enough.

If we'd have a thousand more purple prairie flowers, I'd be thrilled. The truth is, I once tried to dig a bunch out of a ditch just down the road to start them in our backyard. I think it worked, although for a bunch of summers they were barely here. We've got bunches of them now, but not enough--never enough. Maybe next year.

The bee bomb's been slow this summer, it seems, but they're all over out back right now. You gotta love 'em too. 

Cone flowers reign, but they're not really all that majestic, not in the least proud. This year, they've come not as spies, but in battalions. If they didn't paint the place up, I'd come close to calling them weeds, but never let it be said. They can have whatever room they want to take, and they will. They are.

They're swarming through Barb's backyard. They tower if they have to--three or four feet high--and just keep coming. These blossoms will fade, but not for a while; and when they do, there'll be more. They just can't stop multiplying.

And that's okay with me.

So I told my sister I wished she could see out back, and she told me to take some pictures. So here they are and here it is. I can't imagine anyone else in the world being as enthralled by our July glory, but right now what the two of us work at is almost heavenly with native color.

We've got green tomatoes galore, peppers more than we need, and right now more than a dozen muskmelon, although it'll be a couple weeks or so before we can serve 'em up. They're mostly hiding behind a jungle of leaves right now. There are two of them here, if you can see 'em.

You wanted to see, sis. So here I thought I'd try to show you. They're not easy to shoot, like prairie, like mountains, like Lake Michigan. They're much better in real life. Trust me. 

Here's a little men's chorus. Hear 'em sing?

Museums of the Soul

They're after your soul. You got to know that going in. There's a bunch of them across the land, from the woods outside Manchester, NY, where Mr. Smith saw his visions, all the way to Salt Lake City, the place they called Zion and some still do, Mormon museums created to celebrate the LDS story, artifacts and videos and life-sized scenes from the drama that has attended their entire history, and docents who'd just as soon have you leave believing.

Let me tell you, LDS museums are as immaculate as they are comprehensive, and they tell a simply great story. You really ought to stop by, but if you do, don't forget that unlike any other museum around, Mormon museums are after your soul. You won't leave without one of their books. You don't have to buy it--it's gratis. You don't pay for anything when you stop by an LDS museum--aside, maybe, from a little dignity. 

But don't let that bother you. You could do worse than have good folks concerned with your eternal welfare. 

And, the fact is, the Mormons have an amazing story to tell, a story most unbelievers, like me, don't know and don't figure we need to because it's all about them and not us, and maybe that's true. 

But next time you go to the Omaha airport, take an extra half hour, go a few blocks south of the turnoff and head straight up the hill to an absolutely dustless museum where some fervent docent will offer you a smile so harrowing you can't help but recognize she's looking for converts. Just listen to her. Won't hurt you.

Across the street there's a cemetery with just three stones from the days of the Winter Quarters, a time when the neighborhood held nothing but saints on their way to the glory of Zion. Utah--a place none of them had ever been but most could have described, I'm sure, a place close to heaven, a place in their dreams they called Zion. 

So they stopped right there, before there was an Omaha, and, just about overnight, they built a city. Seriously. They stopped right then and there--June, 1846--and built a city where there wasn't any. That whole community--eventually, 4000 Latter-Day Saints left from the Winter Quarters and Kanesville, a town they built that now goes by the name of Council Bluffs. There wasn't a Council Bluffs in the mid 1840s; there was only Kanesville, their word, hard as that is to believe. 

There's a museum there too, by the way, a little one so completely tucked in by suburbia that it wouldn't be hard to believe life-long residents have never visited nor have ever even seen the place. Stop by sometime--won't take you a half hour--and have a look yourself at the replica Tabernacle where Brigham Young was sustained (you have to use the right word. He wasn't voted in--a church is no democracy, after all. So Brigham and his cohorts were, right there, in 1848, sustained in the original temple, which was back then the biggest building west of the Mississippi. 

It was 1846, and there wasn't much up on a bluff above the Missouri. A man named Brigham Young couldn't help but know that if they were going to make it over the Rockies, all the way to Utah, June on the Missouri was way too late in the year to start the trek. He'd imperil the lives of hundreds, of thousands of Mormons full of his and their peculiar vision of the American West.

And then, almost overnight, it was gone, as were most of the Mormons, thousands of them, vanished, their entire abode emptied, the whole bunch of them following the dream. The whole city maybe the west's very first example of planned obsolescence--here today, gone tomorrow. 

It's not that the whole story has been erased--there's a Mormon Bridge over the Missouri, and the Mormon Trail Motel in old Florence, north Omaha, a couple dozen other uses of the name. But there's nothing but museums to commemorate that massive movement of people in, and then, two years later, out of what the Mormons call Winter Quarters.

I stopped at the Kanesville Tabernacle last spring, when a volunteer crew of men off the canvas of American Gothic were putting in some scrawny annuals, noble work. The docent, the man who dedicated himself to me, the visit of a single tourist that afternoon, was outside in a white shirt and tie, getting his hands dirty with the landscaping crew of other retirees. He excused himself for his dirty hands.

The Kanesville Tabernacle Monument is an enterprise run righteously. Just think of it--175 years ago there were thousands here overnight, thousands in the Winter Quarters and all around the region, on their way to Zion. 

If you're like me, that whole story may not be yours, but I'll have you believe it's ours. Go ahead and stop by. Those places are perfectly clean--spotless restrooms. Go ahead and take a Book of the Mormon they'll try to stick you with. Stop by and listen to the incredible story they'll tell. You could do worse than a friendly chat with good-hearted folks with dirt on their hands and eternity on their minds. 

They've got a story. Right here among us, they got a tale to tell.

The story of my first story -- ii

Mr. Egan

(continued from yesterday)

I don't remember if I wrote that story at the kitchen table, or if I sat up in my room with pen and paper. For some reason, I don't think I typed it, although, a semester before if I'm not mistaken, I was taking Typing, an honest-to-goodness high school course a thousand years ago. By my junior year in high school, my sisters were both off to college. I was, for all practical purposes, an only child, so wherever I wrote the story, I was alone. 

But I had in my mind a bear, a bear in the lakeshore woods, with me holding a pitifully inept shotgun. That's it. 

I don't remember where I bought it, but I owned a wonderful little shotgun--a 16-gauge double-barrel I really loved and would, today, love to have hanging here up on my wall. It's odd that I don't remember where I got it, or how or when I got rid of it; but this short story of mine began with a kid in the woods, sitting in place--we used to call it "posting"--while cradled in his arms is a sweet little double-barrel 16-gauge shotgun--a Remington? I don't remember.

Sometimes we'd hunt squirrels. I can't begin to imagine what possible thrill any of us might have received from killing squirrels, but then, truth be told, I don't remember shooting many, if any, at all. But I do remember sitting in silence in the woods and waiting for them to appear, an odd species of hunting that had, I'd discovered, paid its own odd dividends.

What I learned about "posting," whether it was for squirrels or for deer, was that the woods came alive in silence. When you didn't make a fuss, didn't kick leaves around or brush through low-hanging branches, when you didn't move too quickly or move at all, things happened all around. Not only did squirrels appear, birds tramped around in the dead leaves or pranced with a kind of exquisite nonchalance on nearby branches. 

That's where my story started, I thought, a kid posting in the woods, waiting for deer, not squirrels. I knew people did that, even though I never had hunted deer. There's this kid with a shotgun, and he's sitting in a woods, posting, watching the place come alive with a mysterious beauty all its own when straight out of northern Wisconsin, the mother of all black bears comes flying up out of the thick darkness, spitting and snarling and thinking to sup on the kid in the red jacket.

The thing is, that sweet 16-gauge just ain't going to do it--and the kid knows it. He has no choice, he thinks, so he turns and runs, flies through the woods, carrying that double-barrel while that she-bear romps along behind him--and, yes, there is some kind of cartoon horror. I'm just a kid. 

The thing is, he's on a path through the woods, but the path isn't blacktopped. Here and there, up and down the path, tree roots have grown up and out of the path like the knuckles of so many giant hands, so while he's sprinting away and, when he dares looking behind him at ferocious death itself, sadly and dangerously he trips on one of those tree roots and goes splat on the floor of the woods.

It's looking, of course, like instant death--but remember, I'm just 16 years old, and no Hemingway. 

But the kid has smarts. He almost instinctively know his only chance is to wait until he can smell that beast's breath, then hold that double-barrel out in front of him, keep it there until the bear is hovering, then let go, both barrels, and blow the beast's heart out. 

Which he does. The bear, stunned, does something cartoonish as he suddenly realizes he's breathed his last, then falls atop the kid, the me in the story (I think I'm writing first person, even though I wouldn't have known what that meant), and he finds himself quilted by a a 400-pound monster.

But alive. Thank God a'mighty, alive.

End of story. No morals, really, pure action-adventure. I wasn't writing parables. And all of this was long before I'd ever heard the name Manfred or anything akin to Lord Grizzily.

I handed it in on time, as I remember, even a little proud of myself.

A week later, at the end of the class second-period English, Mr. Egan sauntered by my desk. We were waiting for the bell to ring, that moment in the olden days when we were "of the class" but no longer "in it."  

He learned over. Whatever he intended to say was just to me, not to anyone else. "Tomorrow," he said, "I want you to read your story to the class." 

I can't imagine I said anything, but I remember very clearly that the request came out of nowhere. I mean, I thought the story was good, but I had no idea whether or not he or anyone else would. Besides, it wasn't all that hard to write.

When tomorrow came, I was tangle of nerves. I wasn't a model student back then, not National Honor Society material. I was a jock, a gym rat, a member of almost any team OHS could field. It wasn't my thing to be a scholar. 

When tomorrow came, I stood behind the wooden podium and started to read and almost immediately thinking that the class seemed unusually silent, kind of "into it," stunned almost, and I'm sure only a few of the kids were real hunters. The story got 'em.  It pulled 'em in and ate 'em up. 

And when it was over, I walked down the aisle to my seat in the back of the room. What I saw around me could have been zombies. 

I don't know who anymore, but I think it might have been Reggie, a good old hunting buddy, who, perfectly startled, looked at me and muttered in all innocence, "Where'd you get that?" I grew up in a Calvinist community, but that question had nothing to do with sin and everything to do with awe. He couldn't believe I'd written the story I'd just read.

Did I decide at that moment to be some kind of writer?

Heavens no, but in that high school English class, 1964, Oostburg High School, Oostburg, Wisconsin, right there on the lakeshore, a kid with a 16-gauge double barrel bagged a trophy he'd never forget. He killed a b'ar that taught him--taught me!-even if I wouldn't have said it then, that there's something to be said about writing, something sort of amazing. Blew me away.

That high school story is long gone. I can't retrieve its weathered pages from some rusty file cabinet, can't post it here or read it to you. You'll just have to take my word for it, just as Mr. Egan's English class had to take my word that a kid on post in the lakeshore woods nearly got mauled by a black bear who'd wandered down from northern Wisconsin.

As close as I can remember, that's the story of my first story, almost sixty years ago. Don't look for any corroboration. I'm sure there's not a soul in the world who remembers but me. I've not forgotten.

 

The story of my first story

What's up there on the top shelf is Schaap stuff, lots of books I wrote. People sometimes ask me just exactly how many books I've written. Honestly, I don't know, and I'm not about to do a census. The answer is, I've written things for a long, long time--fifty years at least. 

These days I'm at the age when looking back allows a clearer vision than any other direction--and that's not saying much. My readership is minimal, as it has been, so I'm thinking someday, maybe, some great-grandchild will be interested in reading something about this odd ancestor from the old days. What was he like anyway? 'He wrote books,' you say?--no kidding? What's a book?

And how come? Whatever got into him to start writing stuff?

For him or her or them, here's the story of my first story.

_________________________________

Maybe just sixteen--I'm not sure. Just a kid really, a boy growing up on the Wisconsin lakeshore, greatly taken with hunting and trapping and the woods all around. I was a town kid, but in the 1950s few of us really were. What was all around was by no means frontier, but there were endless untouched woodlots and the gigantic lakeshore, a hardwood forest just off the seam of sea and sky. 

I'm not sure I'd call myself a hunter, not even then. Real hunters abound in rural Wisconsin, where I grew up. Boys grow up with guns. When I was sixteen, I wanted to be that kind of hunter, but I'd have been something of an anomaly in my family. My father, a good, good man, never stepped out much farther than the edge of town. We didn't have a cabin up north where an entire family might go for the deer opener. He didn't hunt pheasants or pull on waders to hunt duck. He wasn't interested even in tramping through the sand dunes on the lakeshore woods. Never did, as I remember.

I don't blame him for that, never have. What dominated his time was important matters like town business (he was president of the village) and school boards, not to mention a job that frequently had him out of town. He was active, busy, and much beloved. I could not have been raised by a better father. 

Hunting--and trapping before that--was something I had to learn from someone other than my dad, and it was a boy's thing really. My early winters on the trapline belonged to bike-riding buddies who got up long before dawn to check traps no matter what the weather.  We took bikes out west to the river as long as winter held off. 

I don't know that kids today are granted the freedom we loved back then. My parents knew about where we were--somewhere on the Onion River west of town, but I don't think they even turned over in bed in the darkness when I'd get up to leave. 

I'm not at all surprised that when Mr. Eagan gave an assignment for each of us in sophomore English to write a short story, I chose something about hunting. It was, at that moment in my life, a big, big deal. 

Mr. Eagan was a foreigner among us. We knew--I don't know how--that he was cut from a different cloth. He wasn't one of  the local Dutch, not one bit. He hailed from Montana, way out west, but he didn't wear cowboy boots or don a Stetson, never said a thing about running cattle or fighting off wolves or chapped cowboys. We just knew he was from out west, and we knew he was single, and that he boarded at Elsie's place, where other single teachers boarded too.

And he wasn't young. If he had a family, they were nowhere to be seen. His being alone at his age made him more than a little mysterious. What we knew for sure was that we liked him. He was, bar none, the finest English teacher we'd had or would have in high school. 

Why?--I don't know that answer. Sometimes there's real mystery in determining who is and who isn't a good teacher. Egan, simply, was. I say that because the assignment he gave was one I took very seriously, not because I'd long ago determined I would someday be a writer: that thought never passed my mind. I took the assignment seriously because, like all good teachers, he made it clear that he took the assignment seriously because, I'm sure, he took us seriously.

Maybe that's it. He wasn't flashy. He was short and pudgy, not given to in-class dramatics, didn't cry through the last scene of Romeo and Juliet, didn't even act as if teaching was the one thing in his life that mattered. In every way as I remember him, he was convincingly ordinary. But we loved him.

Wish I could explain that somehow and impart the wisdom to undergraduates, but I can't. 

So, the assignment: write a short story. I don't know that he told us anything about how to do it; he just made the assignment, this guy we kind of loved. Write a short story. 

"Hunting," I told myself. Mine is going to be about hunting, but what?

Something really scary--a bear! Sure, a bear! There's this kid hunting, and, lo and behold, what should come out or the darkness of the woods before him but a bear. Yeah. That's it!

_______________________ 

Continued tomorrow.

Highway humor (sort of)

 

You can't help but commend the guy's devotion. Singing the praise of your candidate is red-white-and-blue Americana; voting is a privilege, a right, and a responsibility. 

What's more, mean winds blow out here in northwest Iowa. Building a frame for a big sign proclaiming the candidate(s) of your choice bespeaks a real depth of devotion. This sign shall not be moved and still stands, today, just down the road, almost twenty months after the 2020 election, a testimony to the owner's adoration. 

But not his smarts.

This dynamic duo certainly is no more. If the Trumpster runs again, the silver-haired ex-senator won't be there beside him. The Prince of Orange almost had his VP hung.

Today, this old sign is, well, black humor. But who will break the news to the guy who put it up? 

Nope, not me. 

The Fossil at Cherokee

Given the scale of what once was, it wouldn’t be difficult to call the place “Siouxland's biggest fossil,” a sprawling, endless petrifaction. Walk out the door of the lobby, keep the walls on your left and circle the entire place--it'll take you the better part of a half hour because the place is gargantuan.

A century ago, it had to have been perfectly colossal because 120 years later it still is. If you've never seen it, drive up sometime. It’ll stop you in your tracks.

Once upon a time masons pieced together a smokestack from the inside, 25-feet in circumference, stone on stone to 192 feet high. That smokestack is long gone, but to get a sense of its size, you'd have to be way on top and still use a wide-angle lens.

Sheldon wanted it. So did LeMars, Ft. Dodge, and Storm Lake. They all knew it was going to be huge. When the legislature decided Iowa's new hospital for the insane would be planted in the far northwest, frontier towns knew bringing the castle home would put their community on the map.

Politics drove things along a century ago just as they do today. In Des Moines the battle raged. Storm Lake's candidacy got bumped when some pseudo-scientist claimed that water was far too inviting "as a means whereby lunatics commit suicide." [Their language, not mine.]

LeMars became the favorite. But some now largely-unremembered bill about liquor angered LeMars-leaning democrats, whose favor then swung Sheldon's way. Who knows whose ear got bent and how? But when the smoke and fire cleared, Cherokee won the Hospital for the Insane--or the Lunatic Asylum (seriously, those were aliases).

The dimensions of that decision are themselves stunning. It was built big enough to hold a thousand patients on 840 rural acres a mile west of town. It's hung with 1810 windows and a thousand doors for 550 rooms, 23 dining rooms, 30 baths, and 18 mop closets. Twelve acres of floor surface, 93,000 yards of plastering, 2300 lights. It's foundation of Sioux Falls granite is 1 1/4 miles around.

Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride created the design back in the 1890s. He preached an enlightened gospel, to wit, that the treatment of mental illness required environs that looked like home, not prison. Kirkbride's "Moral Treatment" theories dictated marble fireplaces, spacious hallways, elaborate lighting. Still today, the Cherokee Mental Institute looks like a dozen Downton Abbeys.

The grounds are well kept, trees so tall and strong that one can only imagine what this behemoth looked like standing atop a bare plain with nary a tree in sight. It was a city on a hill.

Still, there's something from the pages of Edgar Allen Poe here. Some of the buildings are wrecks these days. Even around the ones still used you expect bolts of lightning, men with vacant eyes and unreasonable smiles, inmates in straight-jackets or chains, hideous laughter ratcheting into screams. The place looks like a horror movie, and for many, I'm sure, it was a place you were blessed to leave.

But a woman who grew up just down the hill told me she got used to seeing men and women in white walking through their garden. She never minded it really, never felt particularly afraid because the patients who’d wander weren't vicious or violent. Most were on their way back. The laboratories looked nothing like Dr. Frankenstein's. It's a foreboding place to be sure, but monstrous only in dimensions.

But it is a fossil because it holds remains of a time in the history of our treatment of the mentally ill that has almost nothing to do with today. Once, almost 2000 people lived there. Today, you'll see, not so. Part of the place is ghost town.

For decades, the Cherokee Hospital for the Insane was a palace people used as a dumping ground. They brought their grotesques here and left them because once upon a time we hid away people we considered embarrassments. The cemetery holds the graves of 800+ patients who died here, but none has a name because even in death, they were unwanted.

The Lunatic Asylum, people called it--and worse, "nut house," "funny farm," words that are themselves fossils. Insane is retired, thankfully, today thought obscene.

If the moral character of a society can be assessed by its treatment of its most vulnerable, then the story of the Cherokee Institute, this sprawling city on the hill, like a fossil, is full of and sometimes haunted by stories of what we've been and who we are.

You can arrange a tour, and there's even a basement museum you won't forget. And the place is not a fossil, after all. Great work still goes on at and in the city on a hill.

Drive up sometime and see for yourself. There's a wonderful hiking trail, almost three miles, around its perimeter. The place will take your breath away.

Sunday Morning Meds -- When?

“What right have you to recite my laws

 or take my covenant on your lips?

You hate my instruction 

and cast my words behind you.” Psalm 50:16

Not that many years ago, a student of mine who liked to haunt my office was talking about her church, one of the new ones, full of raised hands and happy faces. “You’d like it,” she told me. “You really would—you ought to try it sometime.”

Like a new flavor cappuccino.

She shrugged her shoulders. “But every once in a while—when I get all up or something—then I need to go back to Bethel,” she said, referring to a church offering a far more traditional worship style. "I just to get my nerves settled down—you know?”

That was my introduction to a phenomenon this morning’s New York Times* uses on the front page of their on-line edition: “Church to Church—Teenagers Seek Church That Fits.” What the article explains is the kind of church-shopping—church-hopping, really—being done, reportedly, by hundreds of thousands of evangelical Christian teenagers, including my own students.

Their parents approve, the Times reported. Believing parents long for nothing on this earth more than their kid’s growing relationship with Jesus Christ. One mother, whose Netherlandic name suggests she was born in the same Calvinist order I was, is quoted this way: “’I saw that my parents' relationship to Christ and my relationship to Jesus Christ were different, and my kids aren't going to relate to Jesus Christ the same way we do,’ said Emily's mother, Tracy Hoogenboom, 49. ‘And that's to be expected because Jesus Christ is your own personal lord and savior.’"

Makes sense. But sometimes I wonder how people like that Mom read passages like Psalm 50. Oh, forget the vituperation and the lines in the sand God Almighty draws so succinctly. Forget false recitation and the bogus covenant-making. Forget vanity, and snake oil.

I wonder, simply, what some fine believers do, simply, with the tone of voice of the God Almighty of Psalm 50. Does she ever think about the snarling God of Psalm 50 as her daughter’s “personal lord and savior”? Or is that just Jesus?

“All that’s left is ego,” a friend of mine, a preacher, told me recently. In the withering of established institutions (church, school, family, and bowling team) created by our myopic affluence, all that’s left is ego, is self—almighty “choice.” It’s the only real commodity. We all got to get our needs met.

When Christ himself describes moving human beings to his left and right, he explains his actions on their behavior toward the needy. Interestingly, neither sheep nor goats have a clue why they’re being sent to heaven or hell. “When did we see you hungry or lame or in prison?”—that’s what they both say, bewildered.

What strikes terror in my soul about Psalm 50’s vision of an irate God is that it seems virtually impossible for me to see myself as the recipient of his rage in these verses. After all, when did I falsely recite God’s laws? When did I not treasure his covenant? When did I not take him seriously, for pity sake? When did I slough off his words?

I just don’t remember any such thing. Perhaps I need to think a bit.

MAGA man

During the Watergate summer, fifty years ago, I was transfixed by the courtroom drama that went on, day after day. I was a grad student at Arizona State University, taking summer classes, not seminars but ordinary classes, to compensate for what the English department marked as my undergrad deficiencies.

TVs were rolled into the hallways between classrooms in the English department. Whenever classes went into a break, the hallways would fill with kids watching every minute, waiting for the blade to fall. When I'd leave campus, I'd listen on the car radio. When I'd get back to our little apartment, I'd put on TV, first thing.

Last night I watched, stem to stern, what once purported to be the last of the January 6 Committee hearings. I hadn't watched any of them before, even though I think it's fair to say that my distaste for Donald E. Trump is even greater than the hate--let's call it that, I confess--I held for Richard M. Nixon.

Even though nothing would suit me more than to put the Orange man behind bars for what he's done and what he didn't do, I didn't take the time to watch, in part, because it seemed to me the man was already guilty of whatever it was the Jan 6 committee would dig up and dish out. The only mystery in this case is how on earth Trump gets by with so much of what he's done. Remember that phone call to Georgia? 

This morning's New York Times Magazine's feature attempts to explain how on earth a crooked New York grifter altered American Democracy, specifically how he retooled the entire Republican party to the tune of "Stop the Steal," when clearly he was the crook doing grand larceny. Ex-President Trump may well ride off into a Florida sunset--his adoration is fading--but the MAGA movement, a hybrid religion really, is going strong. A whole array of MAGAs are poised to take control of all kinds of things, including elections in a bevy of states. They win, Trump wins.

Thus, the Republic is in danger, or so the opposition argues--and I agree.

Trump lied. How's that for understatement?

Trump is the great MAGA potentate of lies. Trump wouldn't know the truth if it bit off his nose. The sad, reprehensible truth is, right now, watching Fox and Friends in his boxers in Mar-a-lago, Trump believes, righteously, that he won the 2020 election "in a landslide," as he can't help saying. He's not lying if he believes it himself, right? 

What last night's prime-time Jan 6 committee established clearly is that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, that Donald E. Trump would not act when just about everyone him told him in no uncertain terms that what was happening on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue had become an insurrection, would lead to the deaths of capital police, struck fear in the hearts of every last senator and representative, and, in fact, threatened the life of his own VP, who finally took it into his own hands to call in the troops and quell the riot when the Donald absolutely would not.

How anyone can believe him is beyond me.

Still, whatever the Department of Justice does with what the Jan 6 committee has so plainly and convincingly established, what Trump began--the MAGA movement--will remain. As the Times essay says this morning, "History, faith, crime, retribution: These are the rudiments of a new strain of Republican politics, shaped by the last year of Trump’s presidency — the second impeachment trial, the coronavirus pandemic, the campaign — but destined to extend far beyond it."

It's not over. Not by a long shot.

Grief on the way west

This is Bernini's David, a work of art that isn't just to look at. When you share the room with him, as he winds up for combat with Goliath, you know you're in a battle. He's coiled like an Olympian with a discus, but he's got a sling and he's about to leave an indelible mark on a giant. 

Bernini wanted you to feel the David and Goliath story, to experience the story's significant moment of life-and-death truth. Renegade reformers were upsetting the church's applecart. Something had to be done. Bernini and other baroque artists claimed you couldn't just observe the Bible's stories anymore; you couldn't just idealize biblical characters, put them on some Renaissance flannelgraph. People had to feel them. If you want to understand what the term baroque means, step into the room with Bernini's David, where the boy is soon to become a man by felling a monster. David isn't an illustration; he's an 600-year-old marble action figure. 

If you've never been moved by sculpture, you've probably never been to Rome. But I don't mind saying that you don't have to tour Italy to see impressive sculpture. There's a piece just down the road that'll take your breath away, even though the two major characters are neither identified nor even noteworthy. Though their names are immaterial their suffering is profound, the agony that surpasses any other, the death of a child, not just any child either, the death of their child.

This one has none of the naked beauty of Michaelangelo's David, none of the almost mercurial action of Bernini's. The faces are indistinct. Just exactly who this was of little consequence. What sculptured monument in the graveyard across the street from the Mormon Trail Museum at Winter Quarters in Omaha is meant to commemorate is not who but how--how the suffering along the trail to Zion, to home, required faith that could move mountains, faith to overcome the worst life itself can bring--death.

It's a young couple. Since there are no clinging children anywhere to be seen, what we can't help but notice is that the child, way down there beneath their feet, ready for burial is their first and only. The father does his best to hold to his wife, but he's on stony ground, not the prairie. These two are nowhere near the Missouri River. The setting is itself a rocky climb, a precarious place. He's trying to keep balance himself in a strong wind, while holding the baby's mother as close as humanly possible.

Their faces are downward and dark, as if our looking any closer at their faces would be unseemly of us. The darkness is their dignity. We don't need to see their swollen eyes to know at least something of what it is they feel just then. 

And there is an inescapable premise here. The two of them, mother and father, are on a trail to Zion, on their way west. The suffering they're undergoing is in quest of a better life, and soon enough, mother and father will have go, leaving their precious bundle--the child about to buried beneath them is a baby--behind. In the bottom left corner you can see the child's face in a grave carved out from the rock.

The story the sculpture tells has particular meaning in the Winter Quarters cemetery, where only three graves remain from hundreds who died here while the LDS people were waiting to winter to abate so they keep moving west toward the Salt Lake. But the artistry reaches beyond the immediate and into the universal, for while the leave-taking is particular in its grief, the loss is anyone's. 

I've not experienced it myself, but many have and many do and many will. There's just something about the sculpture that brings me back time and time again. It's just so very telling. 

A Son of the Middle Border

She rose from the cow’s side at last, and, taking her pails of foaming milk, staggered toward the gate. The two pails hung from her lean arms, her bare feet slipped on the filthy ground, her greasy and faded calico dress showed her tired, swollen ankles, and the mosquitoes swarmed mercilessly on her neck and bedded themselves in her colorless hair.

You're thinking Cinderella maybe? Good guess, but the setting is no match--no court, no Prince, no overfed grumbletonian sisters; instead, as you can tell, we're in farm country, ours, circa 1850, Sim Burnes' wife, or so Hamlin Garland tells us in the very first line of the story "had never been handsome, even in the early days of her girlhood."

So who is this sexist pig Hamlin Garland?--and why, pray tell, should I tune in to the schluck's misogynist rants? Maybe you shouldn't. Millions don't. Hamlin Garland has largely disappeared from high school lit texts, even though at one time he won a Pulitzer Prize and was thought to be one of the finest writers of his time.

These days, however, he's no longer read, in part because the subject matter he chose--subject matter that chose him--is the hardscrabble settling of the region he called "the Middle Border," a composite of the very westward movement his own family, like so many others, traveled mid-19th century.

Garland was born in western Wisconsin, grew up in central Iowa, and moved as a young man to the Dakota Territory, as his father and thousands of other Euro-Americans bullied their way into Native lands. Richard Garland followed a well-worn script during the era of Manifest Destiny, moving ever farther west as land opened, always looking to nail down a haunting dream of liberty--or something. That he never quite found it is in the record his son, Hamlin, left behind, a whole bundle of stories that define and describe the dreary and depressing demands of the life of a homesteader, especially on its women.

But then, it's good to remember that just breaking new ground was no chore for a sissy. Pulling that plow through the uncut earth demanded the kind of hard work that wore on both man and beast. But 160 acres almost scott-free, and all you had to do was put in a tree or two and an outhouse, improve the land a bit--and you had five years to do it? That seemed just too good.

Garland's descriptions of what it took--and what it took out of his mother especially--are hardscrabble all right. The men in his stories don't ruin their wives and kids by spending hours on end slumped over a stool at the saloon, they make life miserable by demanding unending, back-breaking work round the clock. On a hundreds of townships in what we called, back then, the great Northwest, far more dreams went bust than prospered, some by heat and drought, but most because of the back-breaking work required to build something permanent on ground the Native people white folks displaced never attempted much more than a mobile home they called a tipi.

Garland fashioned the saga of his own experience in the channel already created by at least some of the intellectual forces of his time. Among those who remember his writing, he's often considered "a literary naturalist," one of a whole "school" of writers who couldn't help believing that human beings were powerless losers before the government, or Wall Street, or even endless foul weather. We're all "Under the Lion's Paw," which is how he titled one of his most-read naturalistic stories.

The kind of naturalism Garland adopted doesn't make fun reading. Dire and dark, it gets whiny finally. You get tired of stories that follow characters who get stepped over or stepped on no matter which way they turn.

Garland the naturalist is a Garland for English majors, but not a Garland to love. When, in 1922, after decades living in American cities, he won the Pulitzer, the prize wasn't for stories of a dismal life. He won for memories he drew of those days on the Middle Border, breaking new ground, stories of the work he thought he hated, tales of a boyhood out in the middle of an jaw-dropping nowhere.

A Son of the Middle Border won him the kind of wide attention as a writer that he hadn't achieved--it's an autobiography, of all things. A kind of sequel, The Daughter of the Middle Border, won him the Pulitzer.

He cut a place for himself in the annals of American literature, not by disparaging his own boyhood, but by doing exactly the opposite: by honoring it, by making it sing.

Far away from the Middle Border, he came to came to understand the uniqueness of his childhood, which prompted him to respect it, and finally appreciate it. His Middle Border things offer an encyclopedia of life in the region where we live, mid-19th century.

In the museum of Homestead National Historical Park, there hangs a photo of a bumpkin farmer trying to cut a rug. It's goofy. It's hilarious. It's even a little embarrassing (look at the women behind him). Aside from Fred Astaire, there's something unseemly about old men dancing--old farmers especially; but I can't forget the picture, and I can't forget it not because its so tacky but because it happened: there was life out here on the plains, hard work or not. Read Hamlin Garland. Read Willa Cather.

Maybe they shouldn't have, but out here in the middle of all that openness, sometimes people danced. That too is our story. You bet it is.

 

What I learned from Mrs. Grierson

Alice Kirk Grierson

That Alice Kirk Grierson loved her husband is perfectly clear. The letters she sent him are full of devotion that wasn't simply practiced or platonic. For a woman with her Victorian sensibilities, her passions are as embarrassingly physical as they are evident. That she and her husband were one cannot be doubted. 

Her life was not easy. A major general in the Civil War, Benjamin H. Grierson, a hero at Vicksburg, decided to stay in the military after Appomattox and was subsequently assigned to the West, then shuffled, with his family, to often remote forts where sometimes for weeks and months, Alice and the children lived in tents. Grierson saw lots of action in the Indian wars. His command was the Tenth Cavalry, African-Americans, "buffalo soldiers." Grierson was, from early on, an abolitionist.

When Mrs. Grierson's lot brought her to a well-established fort, when she and her children could move out of a tent and into an actual house--some of which were nicely outfitted--she was immediately thrust into playing hostess to visiting brass and their wives, a task she found as wearying as trying to rear her children in the difficult and faraway places she did. 

Her letters to her husband sometimes protest a bit at the work his position required--both of him (long absences in frontier lands) and of her (playing high society to officers and their wives)--not to mention being Mom.

And Mom she was. Simply naming the children by their ages would be wearying. Given the major general's frequent absences and the danger his pursuit of renegade Comanches throughout the vast, broiling Southwest, their altogether infrequent time together nonetheless bore abundant fruit. Alice Kirk Grierson had no trouble getting pregnant, and each and every beloved baby only served to increase her workload and pile on other anxieties.

There were already so many children and so much to do that she told her husband in a burdened letter that she couldn't help but fear their reunion again because of what she guessed would inevitably happen. 

She tried to explain: 

Charlie's existence I accepted as a matter of course, without either joy or sorrow. Kirkie's with regret, for so soon succeeding him. Robert came nearer being welcomed with joy than any other. Edie was gladly welcome so soon as I knew her sex, but I was exceedingly thankful she did not come until the close of the war. Harry succeeded her too soon to give me as much rest as I would have liked, and it was so hard on me to learn to harmonize public life with nursery duties and other family cares, that I used to feel as if I had scarcely natural affection for Harry, and told you before he was a y ear old, that I would rather die, than have another child, yet no sooner was he weaned than Georgie came into life, but I was neither tempted to commit suicide, nor the fearfully frequent National crime of abortion.

Her last two births left her in depression. "When our precious baby died, you said to me, "bear up, darling, she was with us for some purpose." She says she thinks often of those words: "what is the purpose for which she was with us?" The question is not rhetorical. 

When she hears news of her mother's illness in faraway Chicago, she determines  not to stay any longer in Indian Territory. She must leave Ft. Sill, and when, after a long and grueling stagecoach trip, she arrives at her father's home, she decides, firmly, that it will be some time before she returns to the Major General.

He misses her dearly and tells her so. She knows his loneliness, she says, but she refuses to return and stays through the winter. She will not return when he wants her to for a very simple reason: "My darling husband, I should have gone to my grave if I had not gone to my father's house," she tells him in a letter.

Alice Kirk Grierson is a Christian believer. She abides by what she considered the Bible's directives about being "subject to your husband," of the promise she made to give herself to him when his desires so move. She regards coitus interruptus as unseemly, even a kind of sin. Armed with her faith, she's come to believe the only way she can prevent another pregnancy is by staying away from her husband until she's rebuilt the strength to deal with what she sees as inevitable eventualities--yet another baby.

It's unfair for me to assume my reaction to her story may be the same as anyone else's--in this case specifically, any other men; but I've not been able to forget Mrs. Grier's love letters, for that's what they are, nor the dilemma her situation created for her. 

And times have changed. Birth control today is an industry. The Christian faith, even among the most faithful, doesn't make the demands it did of Mrs. Grierson. I don't know that her story adds anything to the debate surrounding what she called 150 years ago the "National crime of abortion." 

But her letters and her story teaches me--a man, a husband, and a father--two lessons I can't help take to heart: first, as a male, how very much about the subject I don't know; and second, also as a male, to keep my mouth shut about matters Mrs. Grierson's letters make painfully clear I only dimly understand.  

Old Danish Church, Morehead

There ought to be a turnout. There ought to be a sign a mile back--you know, "Scenic Overlook" or something akin, something to warn drivers on E54 that a scene is coming up that looks more like a painting than a church.

If the traffic was any busier, there'd be accidents at the Old Danish Church. Honestly, the place looks make-believe. You will take your eyes off the road--trust me. If you stop the car and stand there for a second, you can't help but expect a gaggle of heavyset men in vests and women in long dresses to step out for a potluck. Kids tear around, playing leap frog over the cemetery stones. Women gather. Men smoke hand-rolled cigarettes or fat, black cigars.

The churchyard spreads out neatly over the long side of the hill. It's manicured so tidily that even the bushes are restrained. The whole scene is perfectly bucolic--rustic, pastoral, darling-ly 19th century Americana.

Which it is. Then again, not. The Old Danish Church is old and ethnically Danish; but its perfectly fitting name derives not from its age but a bloody fight few remember or wish to. That fight began with a revival in the old country, a religious rumble immigrants lugged along way out here. Two visions of the Christian life went to war, as they often do, the "Happy Danes vs. Sad Danes." Their words, not mine.

You're welcome to swim into the theological weeds yourself if it moves you, but let me summarize, beginning with the eye of the storm, the headmaster "Happy Dane," Bishop N. F. S. Grundtvig, who loved his country and his good times. 

The "Sad Danes" spent their time pointing out iniquity and keeping their noses in the scriptures. We might call them 19th century Danish fundamentalists. Once the powers-that-be right here in this Old Danish Church, rural route Moorhead, went along with Grundtvig and the happys, the other half left and climbed the hill behind the church and proceeded spiffily to build their own.

All of explains, sort of, why the one in front of you is called the Old Danish Church, the original, not the hypers' hilltop fortification.   

Still, this Old Danish Church is beautiful. Ought to be on a calendar. Probably has been. Neat as a pin.

An odd stone in the cemetery lists the names of eight children buried beneath one site, a mass grave that commemorates the Johnson kids, taken by a wave of diphtheria that ravaged the community that once existed in the neighborhood of the church.

Peter and Mary Johnson were married here in 1879. They lived in a log cabin up on the hill. Tragedy struck the two of them early, when their little daughter Maggie died, scalded in an accident at home. 

Then came diphtheria. No phones, of course. People practiced strict quarantining to stifle the outbreak, but seven Johnson children fell into sickness, one by one. With each death, Father Johnson would ride his horse up on the hill up above the church where he lived to signal to relatives building a barn down below that another and yet another child had died at home. The relatives would build another casket and dig another grave.

Mother Johnson, in the Old Danish church, sang a hymn for each of her children, a testimony of the depth of her faith. When the seventh died, or so the story goes, the music would no longer come.

No one worships at the Old Danish Church anymore. It's beautiful but not particularly accommodating; once a year, sometime around Memorial Day, people gather to remember the place and the stories and heritage of a community long gone. It might interest you to know that Memorial Day is not chosen because of the holiday weekend, but because of a very special moment in the old church's history. 

Really, you got to love this. After the internal strife, the "Sad Danes" church fell into disrepair and eventually disappeared. Then, in a series of mergers within the Lutheran family, the "Sad Dances"--some of them anyway--moved back in with the "Happy Danes" right here, in the church along County Trunk E54. 

Just thought I'd mention it. 

If you're up in the Loess Hills sometime, and you're coming up from Moorhead along E54, be warned: don't be surprised if the car in front of you suddenly veers off the highway and someone jumps out with a smartphone to snap a picture. Pull up behind them. You'll get your turn. 

There ought to be a turnout. That Old Danish Church is just plain beautiful. It ought to be on a calendar. It's just a little place, off the beaten track. Just thought you'd like to know. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Be Exalted!

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; 

let your glory be over all the earth. Psalm 57:11

Took my breath away. Honestly, it did. Forty years ago, I was on the very edge of what Canadians call “the bush,” in an old 1930s farm home in northern Ontario with twenty-some people, fifteen or so members of one family, all of them smiling. I was an honored guest, the youth retreat speaker, but so were a half-dozen others, kids on retreat. When Dad prayed that first morning at breakfast, I felt the blessing.

One afternoon Dad and his boys butchered a cow. I walked out back to watch. When one of the boys got on the tractor and scooped up the entrails, I asked another one where he was toting blood and guts. “We’ll dump it out back,” he said. I shook my head in the loud sputtering of that tractor. “The bears’ll get it,” he yelled over the popping.

A wilderness family of 17 people so full of love and spirit that I wished the world could take a seat at that long kitchen table and get their own breakfast scoop of porridge. Faith breathed in that house and beamed out there in the bush; and, young writer that I was, I knew, maybe for the first time in my life, that I had to commit what I saw and felt to words.

Some years ago now, 25 years and a half-dozen visits to the place later, I returned from that wilderness family’s mother’s funeral. Her husband had died just a few months before.

It’s a long ride up to the bush, and we got there just before ten at night, the wake just about over. They’d kept the coffin open for us, they said, because they knew we were coming. And there she was, Mom to 15 kids and 50+ grandchildren, most of them there in the church. Her mortal shell was there, but she was gone, somewhere smiling.

Her sons had built the gorgeous coffin, and once we backed away the six of them together closed the lid. I’ve seen wreaths laid at Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but those six strong men bringing the cover down over their mom’s remains, a cover they’d made with their own hands, was a beloved gesture I’ll never forget.

Honestly, I’m not sure what David means when he asks the Lord to exalt himself. It’s as if he’s trying to coax some jittery kid out on the stage for a show that’s been rehearsed for weeks. I’m still not sure God almighty needs a cheerleader. “Be exalted, Lord,” he says, as if the Creator of Heaven and Earth is somehow introverted.

But this morning I’m thinking that the glory of the Lord is not just a perfect dawn or some stupendous miracle that leaves us speechless. The God I know is exalted in the lives of his saints, each of them, and in their going home, all that devoted joy behind.

Once upon a time I attended the funeral of a deeply pious woman, mother of 15, who, long ago, with her husband, made me want to sing in a house on the edge of the bush, with bears for neighbors. Late at night, in the wilderness again, I saw, for the last time, a woman on whom God’s glory shown like some sparkling patina.

I don’t think David had a funeral in mind when he ended this wholehearted psalm of praise with the words he did, but I believe he’d be singing himself at the blessed eternity of the lives of the saints, one more of whom went home back then.

In her annual joy at first robins and early daffodils, in her unceasing prayers for her children, in her lifelong trust in the Lord, that woman, a cheerleader in the God’s glorious wilderness, praised the Lord. God almighty was and is exalted.

Commentary

Happy (and proud) to announce that, at their national convention in Seattle, the Public Media Journalists Association (PMJA) awarded KWIT--and an essay of mine--First Place in "Commentary" feature.

You can read/hear the commentary here:

Milestones, yet another. . .

There's been so many mile markers as of late that I can't help thinking we live on an interstate. Next week, our oldest grandchild repeats marriage vows with her high school beau, who's just now--today actually--coming home from a National Guard deployment at Guantanamo. I told her I wanted to come along when she greets him at the airport. "Haha," she said, in a text. 

I'm sure she's excited. In little more than a week the two of them will be married. A little risky maybe, but I'm a grandpa who altogether too easily forgets that a six-month deployment hardly means absence in this technological age. I mean, I'm quite sure they checked in--Facetime or something--just about every day. He's been gone, but certainly not forgotten nor unseen. Absence hasn't had a chance to make the heart grow fonder; like everything else, absence has gone digital. 

And today, July 14, my companion and partner for the last fifty years has a birthday. I won't say how many, although it's just upward from biblically-warranted three score and ten, but not much. After six months of being the younger of us, she's catching up now, as she always does.

I've said it before, but it is a milestone so I'll say it again: we got married in a fever fifty years ago, June 27, 1972. When we left the reception at the Northwestern Commons, the female beside me wore an outfit that her granddaughter, fifty years later, audibly admired when this old photo came up on a family slide show we put up in Arizona. This outfit--

Good night, what a "going away." Still sets my heart wildly aflame.

I don't remember how we spent her first birthday as a married woman. We lived in a ramshackle place in my Wisconsin hometown, a place my parents discovered when they looked for something to rent for us. I had a job at park I'd worked at during summers when I was in college. Of that short time--just a month or so before we left for Arizona--I remember very little. One afternoon an old high school buddy pounded on the door hard and long enough to wake the dead. Neither of us were, but neither were we inclined just then to leave the bed. That event made it into a story.

Early August and we were off for Iowa, to say goodbye to her folks, and then began the magical mystery tour to Arizona, that little orange VW squareback tugging a U-haul trailer. I can't imagine how I could be that much of an idiot. 

But we made it, and we're still together, a half-century later, me and the birthday girl. For fifty years we've been together, and that woman in that picture is just as beautiful as she ever was, or so saith the man she married long, long ago.

Another milestone. 

Our granddaughter won't read this, I'm sure--she's too busy right now with her good buddy around again and the wedding a week away. But I couldn't ask for more of a blessing for them, that one day, fifty years from now, they'll look at each and smile and remind themselves of ye olde line--how time flies when you're having fun.

Happy birthday, Barbara Kay.