For Reformation Day, 2022

 

They were, all of them, heroes of my childhood. I'm not sure that I thought so when I was in sixth grade, but I knew that there were those in the little Christian school I attended who most certainly wanted me to think they were--each and everyone of them, real bona fide heroes. Not just Hank Aaron or Vince Lombardi either. These men were heroes of faith. There was no higher echelon or greater order.

Zwingli was a firebrand, but then they all were. Zwingli might well have fit in better with today's Christian nationalists because he believed that God almighty needed to be at the helm of both church and state. He wasn't as driven by the importance of the sacrament (the Lord's Supper) as Luther, who largely dismissed Zwingli, didn't even think of him as a believer, despite the fact that their respective theologies were, in the currents of the day, kissin' cousins.

Huss was a hero even to Martin Luther, who claimed that when he'd uncovered, then read Huss's sermons, he was "overwhelmed with astonishment." Huss was Czech, a preacher in Prague, when he began taking on the Holy Catholic Church, and, for doing just that, he was burned at the stake way back in the 15th century. Seriously, the man was hero to my grade-school heroes.

Melanchthon, like Luther, was German, a buddy, in broad terms. Melanchthon also cast his lots with the "justification by faith" folks, which put him too at odds with the Roman Catholic Church, who made it perfectly clear to rich and poor alike in Europe that they were the means of salvation--the church, that is. Melanchthon died of a cold that wouldn't go away, nothing as dramatic as Huss the Czech. 

Luther was Luther. The world I live in is still deeply influenced--his name is everywhere, his churches riding the rolling plains in every direction. He was a man who saw immense spiritual visions, but could be earthy as a blacksmith. He wasn't afraid of banging heads with authorities, but he hung on to the consecration of the sacrament more tenaciously than the others, who tangled with his views on exactly what happened when to the bread-and-wine were dished up in the mass. Him hammering up his objections at Wittenberg is the most iconic image of the Reformation.

And Calvin--well, it's my middle name, my heritage. I knew I was a Calvinist before I knew I was a Protestant, but I didn't know that others--people who weren't even religious--would recognize me as such too. When I was in grad schools, I'd often introduce myself by my middle name, at which time students and profs would arch their eyebrows as if they suddenly recognized some not-to-be mentioned weirdness.

That's when I read Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, which I picked up (both volumes) because I wanted understand why others reacted the way they did when the name arose, as it does frequently in early American literature, well into the 19th century. 

In grad school I learned there is a heritage to Calvinism that has very little to do with tulips and peppermints and no bikes on Sunday. In graduate school, I realized for the first time that my heritage was bigger than I ever thought it was. In graduate school, I learned that the whole Reformation was bigger than I'd ever imagined, that rich German lords threw in their lot with Luther, not because they were such dedicated believers but because they were darn anxious to begin to carve up the immense power of the church. Not until I was in graduate school did I realize that the Reformation wasn't just about Christian doctrine, it was also very much about freedom. 

I understand why Halloween took over October 31st. The Reformers really can't compete with American extravaganza. We had kids once long ago, and we have two darling granddaughters who I doubt will ever know much at all about the Reformation. They'll do just fine. Two other grandchildren are in college, a Christian college. I don't imagine either of them will think much, today, about the Reformation, and they too will do just fine.

But in me there's still a kid from that little Christian school, someone with a middle name that makes some people grimace. In me is someone who can't ever forget that Halloween is also Reformation Day. So, thanks for listening. 

Sunday Morning Meds--"from whence"

 

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from?” 

Psalm 121:1

I wasn’t sure where my daughter’s question came from, and I was busy thinking of something else at the time. That’s why I didn’t give her a very good answer, not a fatherly answer anyway.

“When you were my age,” she said, sort of laughing, “did you ever think that the world was just going to come to an end?”

My daughter is 30. When I was that age, my wife and I had her. But right then I couldn’t remember ever thinking the world was in imminent danger of coming to an end. I smiled and said no, rolled my eyes, and turned back to the computer screen.

Later, I couldn’t sleep.

I was a kid, but I remember learning to crawl under my school desk should nuclear holocaust come to small-town Wisconsin. I grew up in the Cold War, when either the Soviets or some unthinking President was capable of pushing the wrong button or the right one wrongly.

I remember walking on a football field during the Cuban missile crisis and having a profound talk with a kid about whether or not we’d ever have a season. We both knew football was a metaphor; we were talking about the end of the world.

I remember the comet Kohouteck and Y2K. I remember a number of primitive eschatologies—Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, for instance—that ordered our days by manipulating ancient calendars suggested in the minor prophets. End-times theology is big business today, everybody and their dog wanting not to be Left Behind.

I believe my daughter’s generation lives in more fear than mine did because I was reared with more freedom than her kids will ever see. When I was ten, my friends and I took our bikes down to Lake Michigan and lost ourselves and our inhibitions in endless woods. Today that land is private property; but today, no parent would allow her ten-year-old kid that kind of freedom.

The parade of perspective students will start any day now at the college where I teach, and with them come loving, helicopter parents, moms and dads who ask more questions about college than their children do. I never visited the college where I enrolled. My parents drove me there—500 miles—then left. That was it.

As I write, a congressional election looms. The war in Iraq isn’t going well. Even the President wishes we were no longer there, I’m sure. But in order to keep his party in office, he and other Republicans are making sure the American people know that the Democrats, should they win, will cut and run; when they do, the Islamic extremists will terrorize us, even here in a woebegone corner of the rural Midwest. Fear sells.

So this is a better answer than my eye-rolling, Andrea: yes, I’ve felt that way. We all have. We’ve all been afraid. Even the psalmist.

While the psalms tell us bountifully about God, they’re even better at telling us about ourselves. You’re not alone—in more ways than one.

________________________ 

This meditation, like the others that appear here on Sunday mornings, is a replay, a thought of mine twenty years ago. I could edit it for these days because fear is as prevalent today as it was when my daughter asked the question. Even though the specific fears--of violence, Covid, loss of culture, hatred, nationhood, even faith--rise from different sources, the fear she may have felt is just as real, as is the psalmist's false flag, because that's the intent, I believe, of the line that begins a wonderful psalm--121: No, our help doesn't come from the hills, it comes from the Creator God who's made the promises we all need to remember to ward off the shivers that rise so plentifully from the base camps of our lives: "My help comes from the Lord, who made the heavens and the earth."

The Lord will keep you from all harm—

    he will watch over your life;

8 

the Lord will watch over your coming and going

    both now and forevermore.

October morning--fifteen years ago

It was either going to be boom or bust this morning, the darkened sky thick with clouds, a few jagged slashes northeast where the sun would eventually rise. I had decided to go early and get out a long ways away; but by the time I got around to getting packed and coffee-d, it was already a little late.

What's worse, the movement of those thick clouds wasn't promising. Rather than get 45 minutes away only to get shut out, I turned off the blacktop and went back to a favorite spot of mine, betting that the sun wasn't going to poke itself through all those clouds--remnants of a storm somewhere.

Still, it was beautiful--a big passionate sky, full of drama.

The little road I usually take was wet and muddy, but I started down until I came to a gully I figured I'd never get out of without four-wheel drive. So I backed all the way out--half mile maybe--and went back down the hill to a bridge.

There are a couple of great old stump cottonwoods along the creek at the bottom of the section, but they stand halfway across the field, a full half-mile of mid-thigh grass, heavy with last week's constant rain.

I went in. Inside of 50 yards, I could feel the water squish between my toes.

But I got there. I slogged through the long grass, all the while telling myself that the first rule of Saturday morning landscape photography is "be there." So when the sun finally peeked out--not for more than three minutes--I was well-positioned, even though it wasn't the show I was hoping for. 

Got some interesting shots anyway. Didn't go home empty-handed.

Check for yourself.

The morning sky was about an inch and a half from being a real stunner. I did what I could.

What I've noticed about myself through the last five years [this gallery dates from 2007] is that the joy simply of hunting isn't as great anymore. If I get skunked, I'm disappointed. Never used to be that way. For a couple of years, just being out there to meet the morning was the great thrill.

Got to get that back somehow. How? Don't know. I need a great awakening.

_________________________ 

Addendum: Last week on Saturday, at dawn I was out in the northernmost reaches of the Loess Hills. I kept worrying about getting some really good shots, kept thinking about how I could do it. And then I remembered thinking what I did at about this time 15 years ago--to wit, that the motivation for my being out there wasn't getting great pictures. I was out there to visit with the Creator. 

Some things don't change.

What's more, those two photographs on the end have turned out to be among my all-time favorites. 

The haunting at Ponca

You can't help but wonder what on earth eventually happens to all the left-overs. Right now, they're everywhere; every store has a stockpile because in three days it'll be Halloween, and, for years now, Halloween has been a kids' thing. Some moms go bonkers with decorations, turning front yards into actual sets for horror movies. Down the road at the Hy-Vee, one of the pumpkins is so big you'd need to pull up in a skid loader to get the monster into the pick up. 

Up and down the roads last Saturday, Ponca State Park went all Halloween bezonkers. Slips of white cloth, ghostly spirits, hung from from burr oaks already shedding leaves. Wherever you went, you ran into something ghoulish. Boo!!!

But I didn't need bizarre decorations or fake cemeteries. For me at least, stuck as I have been in Missouri River lore, the hills up and down old Muddy somehow are still peopled by the Omahas moving along its shorelines. Here and there, some rumpled and disheveled trapper, followed by his mule and maybe a Native wife, looks for a place to put in a few traps because there's beaver here, and as long as Europe's tastes for proper hats is what it is, a feller can turn a buck or two.

So a path like this, pretty standard stuff, isn't just a feature of the park, it's a regular museum.

 

If you look out and over the river, follow its wandering path as far as the eye can see, there's a pirogue out there, on the blue horizon, and a crew of men in uniform, of all things, coming up river, on their way west. In search of most anything they can find.

Look for yourself. They're up there all right.

I tried to get 'em in the camera while they were out there, but you have to strain hard to see 'em at all.

The thing is, on those paths along those banks, occasionally you'd hear some kind of odd bird call and just know, just know, that there were handfuls of Kaw or Omaha or Osage, maybe Otoe, even maybe a few Dakota watching too. I swear.

A ton of drama out there at the park last week. Honestly, I didn't need the Halloween tomfoolery.

The place was haunted already.

The Old Burr Oak

It's a heckuva climb--up and down--to get there, but the park service makes it possible for its visitors to stop by, to visit up close and personal. Way down there, where a couple hundred steps finally end, stands an ancient burr oak people who  know such things figure grew from some random seed in an age approximate to the pilgrims taking their first American steps at Plymouth Rock--1630-something. It is, they claim, just this year, 376 years old--give or take a winter.

Unless you've been hiking all day and you're 70-something years old, you really must take this Jacob's Ladder stairway down to the old gent. I mean, respect is in order for any being at all of his vintage. I made the trip, so let me bring you up closer here.

It's a comforting thought, largely romantic, I suppose, to imagine this old gent in Ponca State Park to be an upraised hand, branches for fingers. The Christian in me can't help but think of the way people raise their hands for a blessing. That his majesty here on the slope of a loess hill stands there yet today, still receiving blessings turns him into a sermon, if you're church-bred like me.

But then, up close, that accepting hand seems almost frightening, a multi-belly-ed Java the Hutt. I'm serious. There's nothing beautiful about him, or her. She wears a series of Halloween faces on her thick truck, none of them comely. She's hardly beautiful.

Well, let me take that back. There is something beautiful about him or her or it--her not-to-be-believed age. It's a wonder she's lasted this long. The hills all around had to burn more than once in all those years, sprawling fires lit by random strokes of lightening. Somehow, someway, this old lady or man got passed over, so that today, he's still standing and, for the 376th time, shedding its burnished canopy of leaves. 

I can't imagine she didn't love those kids who beat me down those stairs. Old folks always do. When they left and I stood there alone beside the ancient one, I wondered what it might say after seeing me creep down all those stairs. What I'd like to think, after all those years, is that the stretch of her sanctification give me a minute, then, wearing a smile on all those odd faces, ask me graciously about my day. 

There's no particular reason this particular burr oak has been blessed with eternal birthdays. Nothing in its DNA offers a clue to its million days here on the slope (plus 235 thousand more--do the math yourself). Call it luck or fate, if you will. There's nothing supernatural about her or her insides.

When, last summer, we celebrated our 50th anniversary, people shook our hands and congratulated us, as if 50 years together was an accomplishment. It seemed like a odd thing to say, as if we'd stayed on a bronc for a half century. But the sheer repetition of so many "congrats" convinced me finally that it was. Not everyone gets there.

And so it is for King or Queen Burr Oak. She's beautiful, despite her paunchy trunk, messy faces, and crooked arms, worth all those stairs, even if you're an old man with cardboard knees. After all, she's been there when the only humans who ever dropped by--and they made it down the slope without a stairway--were the Omaha. If her majesty has a memory, good night! it's seen a lot. 

That bunch of kids ran down all those stairs before I even got a good start. I took it easy.  On the way up too. But let me tell you, if you ever get to Ponca State Park, that old tree is worth a visit.

Seriously, 376 years old. More power to you.

 

. . .Where I stumbled

[continued from yesterday]

The form the pastor chose last Sunday morning he took from the grey Psalter, the one just previous to the most recent edition, which, you may remember, has no forms at all. 

It seemed to me--I may be wrong--that he spent more time in explanation than he normally does with baptisms, more time with the form, and that may be why I was listening so closely. 

Once, years ago, when a Christian Lao family wanted a child baptized, I got the job of rewriting the form in the gray hymnal into a language the couple might better understand. It was a great job, and it forced me to read a form I'd heard countless times, a form whose truth had registered long ago in me. I mean, I understood it. Still, creating a litany that non-English speakers might understand forced me to think about that form in a way I never had before. 

And this time, in the preacher's own shortened form, I got lost in one line. First, let me remind you what is there--or was there--in the old, yet newest form of the form. 

This part of what is labeled "The Instruction" begins by creating the argument for the baptism of infants: "God graciously includes our children in his covenant, and all his promises are for them as well as us (Gen. 17:7)." Then, more proof, this time from the gospels: 

Jesus himself embraced little children and blessed them (Mark 10:16); and the apostle Paul said that children of believers are  holy (I Cor.7:14). So, just as children of the old covenant received the sign of circumcision, our children are given the sign of baptism. 

Churches have formed and reformed out of all of this, of course, in part because most often we won't part easily with what is most sacred to us, and perhaps nothing is more sacred to Reformed Christians in our church polity than the sacraments. 

I'm not willing to go to the mat for infant baptism, so none of what was said was in the least bothersome until the last line of that form. This is it: "We are therefore always to teach our little ones that they have been set apart by baptism as God's own children."

That hit me--"set apart." I know the comfort of that line--some of us are chosen, others not so, and, thanks be, we are. That's what we are to teach our kids, the form says, remembering Paul and Jesus and the Father Abraham story. We are "set apart." We're not normal. We're favored. We're blessed. We're baptized. 

There's nothing inherently wrong about that, nothing mischievous, nothing close to some sort of wink-and-nod thing. The line is not blasphemy or some errant doctrine. The truth is, I believe it.

But I also believe that in believing it, once upon a time I took it as reassurance that my faith, my religion, put me very much at odds with the world. "Worldliness" is one of those words that long ago was discretely put aside with that oldest purple Psalter. "We are not of this world," is a proposition as deeply set within my psyche as those choruses of "Living for Jesus"; and even though I understand it, and believe it, and stand by it, the idea is no more sacred than our will to state it clearly. 

And I'll tell you why. Because it's woefully close to an ethic that created the fabulous idea of "Manifest Destiny": there's something in us that's special, something in us that allows us, even pushes us to take over a world that was never "ours" to take. 

My grandkids and I used to attend the Memorial Day parade in town. We'd pedal down to a friend's house, where the coffee and juice would be set, and we'd watch what didn't amount to anything more than a fifteen-minute parade--the old vets, the high school band, and some boy scouts, and kids on bikes. My granddaughter was just six years old or so, first grade, when she got up from the porch steps at one point and went to the front door where she stood and turned her back on the parade.

When I asked her what that was all about, she said she'd spotted the local public high school band. "They don't know Jesus," she said. She went to Christian school.

I don't blame her, nor her teachers, nor her parents. But somewhere, in her six-year-old mind she'd picked up the idea that the world is composed of us and them, and they're not us because we have something they don't. Somehow, she got the idea that she was "set apart."

We've come a long way since "the indubitable form." We might still consider our own darling little babies as "children of wrath," but today those words feel like a mouthful of sand. We probably don't loathe ourselves either anymore--there are far, far too many suicides. Let's be clear--we have altered our language in ways that make it easier for us to live with the ideas they attempt to create. 

I'm certainly not saying no one should ever again utter the sentence that distracted me on Sunday--"our little ones . . . have been set apart by baptism as God's own children." But I am saying, "Be careful."

All of this reminds me how significant a gift language really is; it's not a trifle. It often opens worlds we didn't necessarily intend to open.

There's immense comfort in being "set apart." I get that. But there's also a danger in claiming exclusivity, big danger.

1934 Psalter--Harry Dirkse was my grandpa

 

First, that we with our children are conceived and born in sin, and therefore are children of wrath, so that we cannot enter into the kingdom of God, except we are born again. This, the dipping in or sprinkling with water teaches us, whereby the impurity of our souls is signified, that we may be admonished to loathe ourselves, humble ourselves before God, and seek for our purification and salvation apart from ourselves. 

If you recognize those words, you and I are of the same vintage. The quote comes from the 1934 Psalter Hymnal, the one I remember from very long ago--the purple hymnal, the one redone now three times since then (that one at the top of the page). The blue hymnal followed in the year of the American Bicentennial (probably unrelated), in 1976. Then, the gray one, just ten years or so later (1987), followed by most recently by the red one (2013), which most often isn't even removed from the back of the chairs in our church anyway because the lyrics for congregational singing can be read on the screen up front. 

The language I quoted above is long gone too, of course. Orthodox or not, we no longer find it of great importance to recognize our tots as "children of wrath," nor do we think it helpful for us or our children, to be told we should "loathe ourselves," nor for matter "to seek for our purification." Sends a shiver.

That language seems almost crippling in intent, nearly a form of abuse. Yet, I must admit, when, this morning, I read through the old "Form for Infant Baptism," the 1934 version), I remembered it very well. If you're my age, and these were the creeds you heard, Sunday after Sunday, I'm guessing you too haven't forgotten that baptism is a "seal and indubitable testimony." Fancy word, that--"indubitable." I'm sure, as a kid I knew it was a church word. Never heard it anywhere else. 

If, like me, you've long ago lost your hair or watched it silver, listen, and tell me you don't remember this:  

. . .we are obliged to a new obedience, namely that we cleave to this one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that we trust in him and love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our  mind, and with all our strength: that we forsake the world, crucify our old nature, and walk in a godly life. 

That, to me, is as clear to my memory as a chorus or two from "Living for Jesus." As I've often said those old Sunday School ditties (in my case a whole shelf full of kiddie songs from Let Youth Praise Him) are in me--they're deeply, almost hauntingly, planted. They're there--as is that sacramental language.

While subsequent Psalter Hymnals (blue and gray) took some of the rigidity out of the language used for the sacraments and liturgies, the red one (no longer a "psalter"--it's been given a new title Lift Up Your Hearts, which, it might be noted, is a world away from "loath ourselves"), not only changes the way we do baptism and the Lord's Supper, it drops those forms altogether.

I'm not a pastor, but I'm guessing that preachers are well-supplied with suitable explanations of how we should participate in the two sacraments that exist in the Reformed faith, baptism and communion, as well as acceptable formularies should pastors care to read them through before baptism. (The silver one still has a form for excommunication). And I don't doubt that there are pastors in all corners of the denomination who read the forms, and even some who do so with the congregation, never having switched Psalters at all (although I'm guessing the old 1934 edition is in the basement, a museum piece). 

So what happened yesterday was, at least to me, rather startling. We don't have access to the forms anymore, so when our pastor chose to read one, we were totally dependent upon his communicating the whole truth and nothing but. What he read wasn't up on the screen for our convenience, but no one really doubts our pastor's orthodoxy. Everyone in church believes that he's on the straight-and-narrow and that what he somewhat surprisingly read was well, sound Reformed theology.

Anyway, because he read as much as he did, I listened closely, almost as if it were a new experience.

This morning, I went back to the silver (1987) edition to find what he read because I wasn't sure which reading he was using, although had he been reading the old indubitable one (1934), I'm guessing everyone would have noticed. Sure enough, there it was--silver Psalter. 

Tomorrow, I'll let you know what language flagged my attention. 

“. . .when you take away their breath, 

they die and return to the dust. 

 When you send your Spirit, 

they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.” 

 Psalm 104:29-30

On Thursday, the classroom was overheated—the afternoon sun poured in through the windows; the heat felt like a wall. “Let’s go outside,” kids said. In a couple minutes we were seated in green grass beneath the outstretched arms of a massive maple.

I talked too much, as old teachers do—or as I do anyway; and when it was over I told myself the hour and a half probably seemed to them little more than words.

Then I got an e-mail from Sarah. “I hope you are having a good day!” it said. “I greatly enjoyed your lecture today. It was wonderful to sit outside.”

I felt like the teacher of the year.

Even though all of us have an infinite need to be loved, that insatiable appetite can be filled, at least for a time, by two short lines in an e-mail. So very little.

A week ago, my wife took her mother off to a regional hospital for a surgery that eventually didn’t happen—her mother’s condition was too fragile. Today, we count what remains of her life in teaspoons, day by day. Her mother would much rather that it was over, her life. Every day, we simply wait and pray.

That very same morning, at the very same moment, my daughter was up early, holding back tears because her daughter, her first child—was going off to her first day of kindegarten.

On one clear morning last week, we felt the ominous heft of last rites and the cheerful blessing of first things. Such is life.

Yesterday, two precious letters arrived. One from the aging parents of woman who died of ovarian cancer, a woman I helped by arranging her journals into a narrative of her dying. They were very thankful for her book, they said. We keep it beside the couch, they wrote, in spidery handwritten lines, and we pick it up often during the day.

The other letter asked for photographs. It came from a woman whose husband, a wonderful and much-beloved writer, is dying of lung cancer. “Could you send some 8 x 10s?” she asked. “The cards you sent with those pictures of the dawn have been such blessings to us.”

I’ll do it today.

Last night, my wife and I went out on a date—a ritual of sorts—barbeque ribs at a joint across the river. On the drive home, a deer stopped along the road, looked at us for a moment, then loped off through a field of gorgeous yellowing soybeans. When we came home, we made love.

Life is so precious, it’s joys so brittle, so sweet—a few good words, a dawn, a little barbeque sauce, an acquaintance with a deer, cherished flesh shared, and all of it made more precious, surely, by the imminent reality of dying.

All of which is, by my reckoning at least, the subject of Psalm 104. Our lives are precarious and in his hands. He owns our breath. He’s the God of collapsed veins and kindergartens, of overheated rooms and postal delivery. To him belong our moments of death and the joys of our lives. That’s what the psalmist says in 104.

___________________________ 

This meditation, as all of them, every Sunday, have been coming from Sixty at Sixty. In some cases, that means an occasional few, like this one, are twenty years old. That kindergartner got married last month. 

Buechner on "story"

It is well to remember what the ancient creeds of the Christian faith declare credence in. 

"God of God. Light of Light. . .for us and for our solvation came down from heaven. . .born of the Virgin Mary. . .suffered . . .crucified. . .dead. . .rose again. . .sitteth on the right hand of god. . .shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead." That is not a theological idea or a religious system. It is a series of largely flesh-and-blood events that happened, are happening, will happen in time and space. For better or for worse, it is a story.

It is well to remember because it keeps our eyes on the central fact that the Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space that day by day we are all of us involved with, stub our toes on, flounder around in trying to look as if we have good sense. In other words, the truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it's to be found at all, not in the Bible, or the church, or theology--the best they can do is point to the truth--but in our own stories.

If the God  you believe in as an idea doesn't start showing up in what happens to you in your own life, you have as much cause for concern as if the God you don't believe in as an idea does start showing up.

It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life's story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of of others' lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then they are scarcely worth telling._

________________________ 

Just wonderful, methinks, from Frederick Buechner's Beyond Words, one of the finest devotional books I've ever read. 

Little Priest, Warrior

You'd have to look hard to find someone who hasn't seen a man named Ira Hayes, even though he died in 1955 and was buried in Arlington Cemetery. You've seen him because he's one of six marines to hoist the flag on Iwo Gima after several days too many of bloody warfare that would, a week or so later, take the lives of three of others in that photo and later bronzed in the famous sculpture.

Ira Hayes, as lots of people know, was Native American, a Pima from Arizona. On the island, the Japanese were dug in deep to protect themselves and, more importantly, the path to Tokyo. On February 19, 1945, Hayes and his 5th Marine Division, set themselves down in deadly gunfire on the beach. Only after four long days of fighting did they take the 554-foot hill where the six of them raised Old Glory, oblivious to some civilian named Rosenthal, who packed a camera and just happened to snap a shot that America today regards as precious. Few pictures are as iconic as that random shot on an island hill that had far less value than the blood that ran down its sides.

If you look closely or read enough, it should not come as a surprise to know that one of those marines was Native. Even though millions of white folks ran over the lands where precious Native old ones were buried, even though a million Euros laid waste to a Native frontier by killing buffalo and putting up barbed wire fences, today Native American cemeteries offer an flowing sea of Old Glories.

Still today a warrior spirit is no small thing among many tribal people. A host of powwows begin with traditional ceremonies honoring local veterans. A dozen businesses, a main street, and a tribal college just down the road all take the name of a celebrated Winnebago warrior named Little Priest, who happened also to be the last traditional War Chief of the Winnebago Tribe.

In April of 1866, somewhere into Wyoming Territory and far, far from home, Little Priest let his companions know what was about to happen. "Today I will be fighting all day," he told them. 

Turned out to be true. Vastly outnumbered by the enemy, Little Priest somehow got separated from the other Winnebago that morning and was shot four times before putting up impossible resistance in the kind of all-day battle he'd said he would fight. He killed several attackers in the process.

When reinforcements finally arrived, they simply presumed Little Priest was gone but were delighted to discover that he hadn't as yet passed into the Spirit World.

His friends sang and danced over him for four days--Grizzly Bear songs because Little Priest had insisted in a previous life he was himself a grizzly. Slowly, they watched him grow stronger--or so the story goes, until one day, miraculously, he stood and danced himself.

But just a few months later, on September 12, those battle wounds put him down, or, perhaps I should say, "brought him up." Little Priest was gone--you can find his grave at Decatur, NE. But he's not been at all forgotten.

If, like me, your pedigree is European, not Native, it may surprise you to know the enemy that fateful day in Montana Territory wasn't some cavalry unit, not white men. Those who attacked the Winnebago scouts were Arapaho, red men, not white. Little Priest and seventy of his fellow warriors had enlisted as scouts for American forces during the Red Cloud War.

Tell you what--just outside of Winnebago, Nebraska, pull over at the historical marker that celebrates the vets the Winnebago people still recognize as "the Winnebago Scouts." You'll appreciate the reverence people still hold for its warriors, past and present. "In the summer of 1866, upon the return of the Winnebago veterans, a homecoming festival was held," the sign says. "Shortly thereafter, Chief Little Priest died of wounds received in army service." And there's more: 

An annual memorial celebration is held in remembrance of his sacrifice. The year following his death, Little Priest's service flag was raised as a symbol of the tribe's allegiance to their country. This ceremony remains an important part of each celebration. Later the gatherings became known as the Annual Pow-wow.

Just thought you might like to know.

Morning Thanks--The story of a martyr

Charting the emotions of the Stephen story (Acts 6 and 7) isn't easy. I mean, that this Stephen character would disturb the powers-that-be isn't difficult to understand. Generally, people who criticize the muck-a-mucks would be wise to keep down the volume, but this guy kept repeating those damnable words his crucified guru said about destroying everything that's holy. Stephen wasn't preaching the accepted gospel, all right? He was instead telling the Sanhedrin they were the damnable, and he wouldn't shut up.

What's hard to understand is exactly how these events went down. Frustrated as the enemy is, angry as they must have been, violent as they surely proved themselves to be, they somehow allow the man with the face of an angel to give them an entire lecture.

The thing is, he goes on and on and on. They don't stuff his mouth with some dusty scarf, they let him talk and he does. “Brothers and fathers, listen to me!" he says, and for some weird reason, they do. So he goes on for 47 verses, a last-words speech listed in Guiness, I'm sure. 

It's not easy to read the emotions. His accusers, mad as heck, just let him spiel? Seriously? I didn't remember that, didn't remember a thing about Stephen's never-ending, final lengthy testimony. The truth?--I got a little bored myself by its sheer length. These murdering Sanhedriners let him foul the air forever with his angry rant. Seemed odd they would.

But then they killed him, inflicted the death penalty by stones, rocks. As Buechner says, it's hard work to kill a man by stoning, so hard the boys did some serious sweating, got so hot in fact that they took off whatever gear Sanhedriners wore back then and dropped those wraps at the feet of a young zealot named Saul--but that's a story for another time.

We used to read through bible stories when our kids were little, but that was long, long ago. The two of us happened to read through the story of Christianity's first martyr just two nights ago now, and I couldn't help but wonder about the incredible length of that sermon, couldn't chart the emotional character of what went exactly might have gone down that day.

But the stoning came back in technicolor. Stephen's martyrdom is a story little boys don't forget. Once the bad guys start winging rocks, I felt the heft of them in my own hands, not because I wanted Stephen dead, but because I knew that he was not guilty of whatever got him there under that horrifying storm, one melon-sized stone after another after another after another. Stephen got pounded into the ground for the cause of the gospel. He suffered a gruesome death at the name of Jesus. That's what I remembered, in images as potent as any I remember as a boy.

It was amazing, the power of that memory. It was likely the first time I'd read that story in more than a half a century, but just a few words retrieved it. It came back the way some of those old Sunday School ditties--"Dare to be a Daniel"--called up out of nowhere when I'm weeding out back.

I'd forgotten the long speech, but not the gruesome death of an innocent man, a martyr. That stuck--the story stuck. It's there for referencing in the library of my memory should I need to check it out. We read it again, and the action came back--not the long sermon or certainly its length, but the story was there, the stoning, even my grief as a boy for a man who was murdered for the gospel's sake.

Parked somewhere on the shelves of my memory is a volume titled "Martyr," and there in the very first chapter is a dead man stoned to death, a man named Stephen.

It's there, a story I've so clearly never, ever forgotten and never will.

And for that story, this morning, who knows?--almost 70 years ago--I'm greatly thankful, as I am for my parents' determination that I needed to have the story--and others--there for eternity.

I know the story.

No buzzkill here!

Allow me a word or two in my own defense.

The blessedly slow trip through Guthrie's The Big Sky yesterday was the occasion for some significant soul-searching on my part because my appreciation for the novel rises from a heart ever-conscious of the vast difference between Guthrie's work and what we might consider "political correctness." That gap is as wide as Montana. What's in every chapter of The Big Sky cheapens the humanity of women and minorities. What's more, the n-word is sprinkled liberally throughout (pun intended). There's much that's objectionable in The Big Sky, and I doubt that I'd ever use it in a high school literature class. But doggone it!--I loved the novel.

You and me, we should agree, I think, that all of us be allowed at least a few contradictions now-and-then. We're not planks in a political platform, we're real live human beings, for heaven's sake. If we occasionally depart from paths of righteousness, we should get a pass or two, or, pray tell, what's forgiveness for? I loved The Big Sky, despite its impossible-to-miss transgressions. Shouldn't each of us be similarly treated?

And then, just yesterday, Barack Obama--you may have heard of him!--gave an interview on someone's podcast in which he stated that he himself, the liberal's own answer to prayer, sometimes got plumb tired of political correctness. In a story they titled "Barack Obama Blasts Cancel Culture," the Murdoch-owned New York Post didn't try to disguise its glee: the liberal's liberal was--get this!--scolding his own blessed Dems for being way too uptight about things. Here's how the Post wrote it up:

In a new interview with on the “Pod Save America” podcast on Friday, the 44th President said that Democrats have strayed away from a message of equality to “scolding” on social issues.

“My family, my kids, work that gives me satisfaction, having fun,” Obama said. “Hell, not being a buzzkill. And sometimes Democrats are.”

“Sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells, and they want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way, make mistakes,” he added.

So how's that?  Just when I was fretting about coming clean on how much I loved that novel--and, yes, it's racist and it's misogynist, I couldn't help but think that me and Barack aren't forsaking our principles, not for a minute. No buzzkill here. Ain't no way A. B. Guthrie, who won the Pulitzer in 1950 could get anywhere near a National Book Award this year, no way at all. But that doesn't mean I can't like his work.

Me and Barack, we're saying, "Lighten up, libs."

Book Report--The Big Sky

It's hard for me to remember deeply enjoying a novel that's quite so difficult to describe. I loved The Big Sky, which, I suppose, shouldn't be shocking, given my preoccupation with the American West in the last decade. I didn't pick the novel up because A. B. Guthrie won a Pulitzer; besides, his prize came for The Way West, his subsequent novel of a subsequent moment, the greatest American migration of all, much of it occurring on what we call today "the Oregon Trail."

The Big Sky's story, broadly speaking, is the yarns of the mountain man, an immensely important character who may well have received short shrift, even when "Westerns" were a popular obsession. If they did, their exclusion may have been occasioned by the fact that there were so few--and, perhaps, because many were French. The Oregon Trail is American a rhapsody from a multitude; the mountain man, often as not, worked with just a few trusted friends. Their numbers never amounted to much. Tens of thousands, at its height, traveled the Oregon Trail; all tolled, there weren't all that many trappers. Go ahead, name one or two: John Colter, Hugh Glass, Jedediah Smith, and the guy with the knife--Jim Bowie. That's about it.

The Big Sky concerns the adventures of a threesome--two youngins, Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and an old trapper named Dick Summers, who's soon to leave his last rendezvous. Guthrie gives them each his moment at the helm as they move up and down the rivers of the American West; but more than the others, the novel's real story is Boone Caudill, who leaves a fractured home in Kentucky and lights out for the west, as so incredibly many did throughout the entire 19th century.

In much the same way as Shane is considered among the finest "westerns" Hollywood ever produced, The Big Sky has to be ranked among the finest novels in the genre. The thing is, The Big Sky transcends its genre, even though all the characters sound like Gabby Hayes, even though trapping beaver and killing buffalo are mainstays, even though drinking whiskey and getting it on with Injun' girls is the company standard.

In the censoring madness going on today, it's not impossible to imagine The Big Sky being kept off library shelves, although by the libs among us, not our MAGA types. To say the language Guthrie uses is objectionable is plain understatement, and the outright misogyny goes without saying; the boys gets their annual jollies when Native fathers sell their daughters for whiskey or ribbons and baubles, and all, or so it seems, go away happy.

The wilderness is a place where sheer physical strength is as necessary to life as oxygen. It was a man's world, where going without food or shelter for days on end wasn't rare, where the immensity of the natural environment made a solitary man pay a price for what was, undoubtedly, a hardscrabble kingdom of freedom.

If Guthrie is to be believed, the only way to get by in the wilderness was by learning to live with it, and the very best teachers were Native. By the time Boone Caudill returns to Kentucky, the locals who don't recognize him think he's Indian. After all, he dresses, wear his hair, and keeps silence like an Indian. He looks Native, talks Native. After a dozen winters, the uncolonized American west has fashioned him to be, like the woman he treasured, a Piegan.

The language of the novel is extraordinary, sometimes as breathtaking as the wilderness it attempts to offer a reader. There's this, for instance, a view he might have taken from atop Spirit Mound:

From the top Boone could see forever and ever, nearly any way he looked. It was open country, bald and open, without an end. It spread away, flat now and then rolling, going on clear to the sky. A man wouldn't think the whole world was so much. It made the heart come up. It made a man little and still big, like a king looking out. It occurred to Boone that this was the way a bird must feel, free and loose, with the world to choose from. Nothing moved from sky line to sky line. Only down on the river he could see the keelboat showing between the trees, nosing up river like a slow fish. He marked how she poked ahead. He looked on to the tumble of hills that closed in on the river and wondered if she could ever get that far.

There are similar remarkable passages on every page, sometimes maybe a little cartoonish, but more often stunning reveries etched with detailed descriptions in that odd and colorful language. You can't help but wonder how it is that book wasn't written until the 1940s. A. B. Guthrie had to be a mountain man himself. He wasn't.

Boone Caudill might well have learned to kill back in Kentucky or Missouri, but he doesn't do it deliberately until, by the law of the jungle wilderness, he feels he has to, in one case to protect a Native friend from abuse, in another, like an Indian, to steal a horse he needed for survival.

He could well have learned to love back in Kentucky too. In fact, the jealousy which finally and insanely consumes him has no wilderness earmark. In the end, when Boone Caudill kills that which he loves, he's just, sadly enough, another Othello.

A. B. Guthrie's Shane transcended its genre by presenting character who isn't at all bigger-than-life, who isn't mythic, isn't just another John Wayne, but instead a real live human being who happened, once upon a time, to be a gunslinger. Like Shane, The Big Sky is about three Jim Bowies, but none of them make a big deal out of some kind of iconic knife.

There are n-words on almost every chapter, even though the vast majority of usages are by white men referring to themselves as such. I don't know that I can say it more clearly than this--not a single page of The Big Sky is properly politically correct. It's a liberal's nightmare, a MAGA man's bread and butter, but, finally, it's a great novel.

I loved it. This forsworn lib just plain loved it anyway.

Sunday Morning Meds-- (to be) Blessed

“Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven. . .” Psalm 32:1

The word blessed—and what it suggests—remains a treasure. I don’t think you have to believe in Jesus Christ’s redemptive work to aspire to the riches the word suggests. I doubt anyone’s ever done a poll, but my guess is that a multitude of those who spend their nights at what America calls “gaming,” would embrace the word as lovingly as I do, given the right role of the dice. Seated in front of slots or at the poker table, they too would love to be blessed, in their case by what they’d call luck.

But Dame Fortune, in her ancient medieval garb, looked like Sandra Bullock as long as she was smiling. When she’d turn, she’d morph into a warthog.

I believe—and I may be generous here—that everyone from the Pope to the last week’s serial killer would want, more than anything, to be “blessed.” I do too. A considerable number of us, like Jacob, would even fake IDs to get it, if we sensed we were in the neighborhood. To be blessed is a condition that most of us believe we know only because its pursuit dominates our dreams.

Just a few weeks ago, we buried a man named Henry. He was devout, but never, ever self-righteous, always courteous and loving and considerate. I visited him in the wing of the hospital, when his wife of sixty years was close to death, very close, I thought. He spoke to her and read to her, even smiled at her as if she hung on his every word. Maybe she did.

If those who knew him 24/7 ever saw another side of Henry, I don’t want to know. But I’m enough of a Calvinist to believe he was probably capable of something other than the grace that radiated from his presence as long as I knew him. I’m sure he carried his own inner demons, fought his own battles.

When Henry knew his death was imminent, he wrote a note to his children that all travel costs his geographically-dispersed family would accrue for his funeral should be paid before anyone looked into his estate. By profession, he’d been a Professor of Business; that little note was scribbled by the accountant he once was. But it was also the act of a man who knew he’d been blessed and understood that his role was to do likewise.

I bring him up only because it seems to me that, through our lives, most of us know very, very few people to whom we might affix the description of “being truly blessed,” in my book, Henry was one of those. And I’m blessed—as all of us were in this community—to have known him.

But how do we get blessed, if, in fact, being blessed can be somehow obtained? Is there something I can do, or is it simply a gift, like grace itself?

Psalm 1 begins with the same word as does Psalm 32, but then it describes the condition of being blessed by illustrating how the blessed among us conduct their lives, what they do and don’t. Psalm 32, people say, is more of a how-to, a maschil, a sermon psalm.

Read on for yourself. Psalm 32 is a story of being lost—and found. It’s a story about being blessed. Consider its ways and be wise. Better yet, consider its ways and be blessed.

"Lookin' for it"

Just how it is that I am sitting here now in a piney Minnesota cabin, this MacBook Air on my lap, why I'm doing what I am has never been clear to me. The Minnesota part  isn't hard to explain--we've been coming up here for a week in October for several years. We look forward to the sojourn all summer long.

It's dark and quiet all around. My good friend and fellow traveler is a flight of stairs above me, fast asleep and comfortably oblivious to my sitting where I am, typing. Were she even half-awake, however, she would know without having to descend the stairs how it is she's in that king-size bed alone.

What's never been clear to me is why I'm putting words up on a screen in front of me. Why has writing been a constant in my life for a half-century. Thank goodness not everyone is so obsessed. But why me? I had no role models. My mother was a teacher, and a good one;but my dad was an office manager-type. I don't know that he had any idea of who, say, Emily Dickinson was. If there were writers around when I was a kid, I certainly didn't know them.

I was never much a reader--later on this morning, Barbara will disappear into a book. She is capable of losing herself in what she reads. I've never had, nor have, any similar propensity, even though I most certainly love The Big Sky, the old A.B.Guthrie novel that's here right beside me. 

But why have I spent so much of my life with my fingers on a keyboard? I don't know. 

Last week I cleaned out an ancient folder of high school papers and handouts, some college things, and a dittoed copy of a 12-page, single-spaced story in faded blue, a story titled "Lookin' for it," a story that has to have been my very first non-assigned work. I wrote it a half-century ago. If it hadn't turned up in the folder I was going to trash, I would never, ever have remembered it.

It's embarrassing--I didn't know what I was doing and was poisoned by a terminal case of mannered writing.; the story isn't me, but then I'm quite sure I didn't know who me was. There's immense aspiration in the story, made perfectly obvious by a tendency to use a dozen words when, clearly, time and time again, three or four would do. 

A summary: The unnamed narrator is looking for meaning in his life--I never explain why. I simply rely on the trope that most young people were also looking for meaning in the late 60s, when I grew up. He's on his way to New Orleans--why, isn't at all clear-- when, right there along the highway a pair of hitchhikers appear (I did some hitchhiking myself and occasionally picked some up). They too were on their way to New Orleans, although, like the narrator, they're not at all sure why.

There's some boring conversation between them, but eventually they stop at a greasy spoon somewhere in Louisiana, where some rednecks give them a hard time because, in late '60s fashion, they're hippies, I guess. It's a really soft core version of the old Peter Fonda flick, Easy Rider, where similarly befuddled bikers, all of them "lookin' for it," get themselves killed by the same brand of redneck Southerners. 

"Lookin' for it" is a terrible story, really--I mean writing-wise. In other ways it's merely inoffensive. Nothing really happens. By that time in my life, I'd been to New Orleans, and I'd eaten breakfast in a gulf-shore greasy spoon where I felt as if I was from another planet. I was using my life to detail the story, but creating something other than memoir, fiction. 

The narrator is older than the hitchhikers, and he likes them, helps them out by not only giving them the ride they were looking for but also buying some eats. I have no idea whether I was thinking about it at the time, but the older narrator's appreciation for his younger passengers may well be sourced in my appreciation for the high-schoolers I was teaching at the time I wrote the story. In that restaurant, the three of them are of a kind--Yankee hippies. When they leave, they're bonded into family.

What reality I was working with was a reminder that in 1970, the Vietnam War still raging, the nation was split like a ripe melon between young people in henleys and bell-bottoms, and an adult world who remembered World War II far too clearly. The rednecks in the cafe were a circle of Archie Bunkers. We were the meatheads. That's the whole story really, but it reminded me that the royal gorge the nation is experiencing right now-- is not something that never existed before. A minority of 74 million people voted for Donald Trump in 2020 (91 for Biden). That's just huge.

But the answer to the larger question still eludes me. Why do I sit here every morning and march letters across the screen in front of me? Why have I spent so much of my life here? What kind of compulsion is it? Those questions are not answered by a dittoed story titled "Lookin' for it." What the story does reveal, however, is that when I was living alone in a town named Monroe, teaching high school kids in a rural setting in the southwest corner of the state of Wisconsin, I most certainly had the itch.

Back then, I honestly didn't know a thing about how to do it, but I must have spent hours turning out this story anyway. "American Literature" it says at the top of the first page. I'm embarrassed to say that I must have used it somehow for junior English. That's how sure I was that what was in this story was important--more important for me than for them, I'm sure.

It was something I wanted to do--and did.

It was something I wanted to do--and still do, this morning, right now, those strange letters continuing to march across the screen in front of me. 

Just fits

He's done well over the years, as, I suppose, could be expected of someone from my world who basically always played and played hard within the rules. I'm sure he's maintained a presence in a local church, maybe even just one. I wouldn't doubt for a minute that he attained the prominence he had likely once dreamed of, both in that church, as well as an admiring community. 

A half century ago he showed early signs of reaching success in life. He lived across the hall from me during our freshman year of college. When he went off to class, he made sure he was neatly dressed, his short hair combed fittingly. Despite our proximity, I can't say I remember him as a friend, although I'm sure others on our floor of the dorm did. He was a good kid, even back then.

I'm not sure how wealthy he has become, but he is well-heeled, as could be expected. I don't doubt for a minute that he is a sure community leader, a wonderfully helpful neighbor, a good friend to whole numbers of people who've been part of his Bible studies.

Three times, maybe, our paths have crossed in the last 50 years, and all three times he has told me the same story. Goes like this: Once upon a time--he doesn't remember where or when exactly--he happened to meet a pleasant couple who, it turns out, identified themselves as the Schaaps, from Oostburg, Wisconsin.

"Well, you must be related to Jim," he might have said, or something to that effect because he told me, three times, how surprised he was to meet the parents of a guy he knew from the dorm so many years ago, and a guy who'd written all those wonderful things and become so, well, well-known.

I don't know the exact wording of the next line, but I know the effect. The conversation turned into a meditation, as conversations are wont to do among people like me.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" he might have said. "It's just plain amazing what God can do."

He claimed, all three times, that my mom and dad nodded their heads in fulsome agreement. 

Three times he told me that story, but I don't believe the numbers are the reason it sticks with me. There are other reasons, one specifically--that I am somehow supposedly to be just as taken as my parents were with the intended spiritual imperative. He wanted me to nod just as my parents had. It's as if early on I was a kind of Saul, someone the Lord God almighty had to blind before I could see. 

I have never seen myself via the gradients that emerge from that much-beloved story. I'm nowhere near Saul/Paul, and my life has very little to hide or bury. That sign at the top of the page is here in the kitchen of this lovely AirBandB we're renting, "up north" in Minnesota Nice country. My wife of fifty years says she's seen that sentiment before, but it was new to me, even though there's nothing particularly astonishing or even remarkable about it. It just fits--not too tight either--just fits.

I've been doing more than my share of looking back as of late, working on a kind of memoir I'd like my great-grandchildren to have should any of them wonder about their ancestor like I do mine, who left very little. The moment I walked into the kitchen, I couldn't help but think that single line up there on the wall might sit as a frontispiece to the whole collection of things I'm throwing into that memoir.

I don't know that it's something my straight-and-narrow dorm neighbor ever understood, but then the story has this tender underbelly too--I don't know that my own straight-and-narrow mom and dad ever quite understood that either.

I'll have to find a place for it somewhere, if it doesn't, as it has already, find that place itself. It just fits.