Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 90

Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,

for as many years as we have seen trouble.

 

For three days, the child bled profusely from the nose. She was six years old, and doctors had no idea what was causing the bleeding. What’s more, they understood that if the bleeding didn’t stop, her life was in grave danger.

 

It was 1913. The doctors knew very little about transfusions, but they’d started to believe in the importance of somehow getting good new blood back into the little girl’s system, so they asked her father to give his daughter some of his. He complied, one of the first blood transfusions in the state of Michigan.

 

The yellowed newspaper story is titled, “Minister Saves the Life of Daughter By Giving Blood,” and the story it tells ends by explaining how the father “was considerably improved and was able to dress.” Then it adds, “The child was also considerably better and hopes are entertained for her recovery.”

 

Two weeks later she was dead. Little Agnes Gertrude, my grandparents’ child, succumbed once the hemorrhaging returned. For a time, her father’s blood had brightened her face as well as her possibilities, but his gift—as odd to the newspaper readers as it must have seemed to him—would not and did not save her life.

 

Family lore says, at the time, the doctors knew nothing about blood-typing. Her father, my relatives speculate, was as good a choice as the doctors could have made, but he was not a match. Agnes Gertrude, my great aunt, died two weeks after that strange new procedure the doctors called “a transfusion.”

 

I have no newspaper accounts of my grandparents’ grief, but I know some oral history. Agnes’s little sister told me how her father lay face down on the rug of the living room for almost a week after Agnes’s death, as if unable to move. She told me my grandfather was lethargic, depressed, his whole countenance darkened by the mysterious and horrible death of his child.

 

Nothing changed, she said, until he accepted a call to another congregation, a small country church up north. She told me how she remembered riding on a wagon up to that country church, all their possessions packed up behind them, then being greeted by the entire church right there on the lawn, all of them waiting for the new preacher and his family.

 

“And then it was over,” my aunt told me. The darkness ended.

 

I can’t imagine all of the sadness was gone. If my grandparents were still alive today, I’d love to ask them about that loss, to know if even today they could talk about it. But in the eyes of their five-year-old daughter, the one who told me the story, the darkness ended on a summer day on the lawn of a country church full of welcome.

 

I wonder how someone like my grandfather, the preacher, read a verse like this one from Psalm 90. He probably read it a hundred times, at a hundred funerals. I wonder what he thought of its modest petition: “Lord, give us as many days as you do nights, as much joy as sorrow, as many smiles as tears. That’s all we’re asking.”

 

Charles Spurgeon says the request is dear because it’s so childlike. Maybe he’s right. What it is—and thank God almighty for it—is human. It’s so understandable, so obviously wrenched from a mournful human heart.

 

Once in a while, just let us laugh, Lord—we’re not asking for much.

 

Is it any wonder why people love this psalm?

Greenway Hollanders

His name was identifiably Dutch—Tilstra, maybe. . .Kevin Tilstra. Out of two thousand students in the Phoenix high school where I taught, he was, to my knowledge, the only kid blessed, as I am, with a recognizably Dutch surname.

He was thin, I remember, his face, long and pallid, almost emaciated, and his hair, a dry clump of erratic, colorless brush that was always too long. He will never slip from my memory, even though I never poured over his essays, like I did so many other kids’ work that year.

That I knew him at all was an accident of educational theory. Our English Department had its own building, eight classroom areas separated only (if desired) by curtains.

We “team taught” quite a bit, and Kevin belonged to Helene, my colleague. But during class, he sat at the far edge of her class, adjacent to my students.

One day I stumbled on his name on Helene’s rolls. "He's Dutch," I told her, pointing to the name. "The kid is Dutch."

She wasn't moved, barely found the fact amusing.

The next day, when I saw him, I walked over and nudged him. “Hey, Tilstra,” I said. "I’m Dutch." He looked at me strangely. "Schaap—it’s Dutch. You know?--Hollander?"

I could have been speaking another language.

"You’re Dutch too," I told him. "You know that? You’re Dutch—I’m Dutch," I said. "We’re the only Hollanders around here. We got to stick together, see?—a couple of wooden shoes."

He smiled, shrugged his shoulders.

I never knew much more about Kevin Tilstra. Occasionally, I’d bump into him, nudge him like I had that first day, call him a "Hollander." And he’d smile, laugh. He seemed to have few friends.

He had a brother, a freshman I never knew or saw, a brother who was overweight and depressed. One day, I remember, I heard horrible news. “Kevin, you know?—your Kevin?” Helene said. “Did you hear about his brother?”

I had no idea.

“He hung himself—Miller told me this morning," she said, referring to a counselor. “Kevin's not going to be back for awhile—maybe a week.”

Suicide is always shocking, but that day I wasn't haunted by the boy's death. I didn't know Kevin's little brother at all. Even Kevin wasn't my student.

A week later, that long, gangly kid came walking in through the door on my side of the building and headed straight for my desk, coming to me for wisdom or comfort or whatever his shattered soul needed, something he evidently felt I could give him.

He never said a word. He just stood there and waited for understanding from the man who'd told him a half dozen times that the only Hollanders in this school had to stick together. I’ll never forget his silence, nor will I forget mine.

Today, when I think of how a few gentle nudges and a dime’s worth of attention prompted that kid to seek me out for comfort, I can’t help but marvel at how fragile we are, how deeply we all stand in need of love and dignity.

The Stories of Old Ignace -- ii

When the two remaining pilgrims began the return trip from St. Louis, what they faced was yet another arduous journey, this time back north and west, similar dangers all around. Years passed. Back in the Bitterroots, time staggered along among the Flatheads, who waited anxiously for their very own teacher of this stunning new medicine. They grew restless--no news, they thought, was bad news.

In 1835, Old Ignace himself began to think the tribe's emissaries had, somewhere along the way, succumbed to warring bands or wild animals or some unforeseen threats on a trip for which they were vastly less prepared than Lewis and Clark had been thirty years earlier. With every passing month, Old Ignace had become ever more celebrated, like a warm-hearted old Sunday school teacher. A hybrid, Native Christianity spread over the region, so much so that when white colonizers began showing up, they were simply non-plussed when the Nez Perce refused to hunt on the Sabbath--no missionaries could be found anywhere. 

Old Ignace wasn't a solo voice. Other Iroquois believers practiced the old-time religion, as did a growing chorus of others they converted to the certain rituals of 17th century European Catholicism. When the warriors the Flatheads had sent to St. Louis didn't return, Old Ignace grabbed two of his own sons to go to St. Louis with him. The people wanted so badly to have their own Black Robe tell them of this new medicine. Old Ignace grew up in French-speaking Quebec; he knew the language of those St. Louis priests. 

When he and his sons arrived, their reception must have once again had the priests totally dumbfounded. Immediately, Old Iroquois insisted his sons be baptized. They were. In his best French, once again Old Iroquois demanded the church give them a Black Robe to take back to Montana, where a people were starved for the gospel. 

The Jesuits were poor and ragged and struggling. There's was simply no way any of them could raise up a mission out at a place none of them had ever seen, weeks and weeks away. Once again, the emissaries, returning empty-handed, knew the people would feel rejected, defeated.

In 1837, the old Iroquois trapper simply could no longer live with himself, so once again he and, this time, a Nez Perce chief and three Flathead warriors embarked on that same long path to St. Louis, this time in the company of white men, trappers and traders. This time, however, the entire party was attacked by Brule Sioux when they reached a place named Ash Hollow, a place that would, in less than a decade, become a traffic stop for thousands on the Oregon Trail. The Brule Sioux attacked the company, and Old Ignace was killed, along with all his companions. The third expedition had failed.

Even with their leader's passing, the thirst of the Flathead people for Black Robe medicine didn't die or even diminish, and soon--in another year--a fourth delegation departed the valley, just as determined, prayerfully, to return with a priest. 

Stop for a moment and imagine the passions stirred up in a Native tribe or two in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, passions created by an old French-speaking Iroquois trapper from way out east, a man who'd never forgotten the Bible songs of his boyhood, songs about Jesus. By the 1840s, white missionaries, Protestant and Catholic, were moving west by the score. You can be sure not one of them could have dreamed of a mission field so readied for the gospel that the people (they might well have called them "savages") begged for blessings long before anyone in the church had even whispered the gospel they somehow already understood. 

And so it was that at just this time, a 38-year old Flemish Jesuit named DeSmet, Pierre-Jean DeSmet, had taken a mission outpost among the Potawatomi, who'd been pushed west from the Great Lakes, stuck on a reservation in eastern Kansas, and weren't happy. That unhappiness they made clear to Father DeSmet. Neither the Potawatomi nor the Jesuit were prospering. 

Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet

The fourth collection of Bitterroot Valley emissaries, six years after the first, found a man named Fr. DeSmet among the Potawatomi, put on a great sell, and were told that this young priest, taken by their determination, would accompany them to St. Louis and plead their case. One of the party was so taken with the news that he started out immediately for home and walked, through the winter, all of the 1600 miles to spread the great news.

That's how it was that when DeSmet and company eventually reached to Grand Tetons, they it was they were met by more than a thousand Native people from several different tribes of the region, all of whom had camped there, awaiting the arrival of their very own priest. Soon there were 2000 who accompanied the new priest through the mountains to the valley and, day by day, listened to his instruction in the gospel. The biggest Bible school on the continent was taking place in a space that had barely been seen by white people.

Although it was off to a glorious start, DeSmet's ministry in the Bitterroot Valley wasn't the dream it must have seemed to him when thousands of Native people met him. Trials awaited them not that far down the road.

But Consider Old Ignace, whose blessed Catholic childhood formed a firm commitment to a gospel he knew only slightly, a man with several wives and many children, who only rarely went to mass, and was almost totally uneducated in the world of the church. Dare anyone doubt his salvation?

The gospel's immense elasticity always seems  a wonder, a miracle, even a dream. That elasticity has a life of its own, spread far and wide by no other agent than the Holy Spirit him (or her) self. It never really stops, although, in our humanness, we appear to take joy in erecting stops and building fortresses we believe make our lives in His world more firm, secure, and under control. 

By most any theological standard, Old Ignace peddled a grotesque gospel, a medicine, his people would call it, composed of an odd arrangement of ingredients--a heavy dose of medieval Catholic ecclesiastical practice, more than a pinch of Native emotion, and a cup or more of what must have been his own brand of sanctified stubbornness. Whatever it was, his particular faith and its startling effects couldn't be replicated and has, by this day and age, even in the Bitterroots, likely entirely disappeared.

But his story is worth the glorious light it sheds on all of our lives. Just the same, his endless enthusiasm and persistence make me wonder whether, today, I'd like to have him in my church. He wasn't taken by boundaries.

What the scriptures make clear is the Almighty doesn't care. He takes his own where and when He will. We draw lines to say no. We have a long history of taking in keeping undesirables away from what is so precious it could be offered only to us.

Consider Old Ignace. Consider him a saint. God does.

The Stories of Old Ignace

Flathead chief and family, 1855--George Catlin

Consider Old Ignace, a trapper, born somewhere near Montreal, who, in the early 19th century migrated west with others so inclined to make a living in the fur trade. This man, Ignace La Mouse, was his name, plied his trade and his faith when he and 23 good friends from out east joined forces with the Flathead people in Montana and Idaho.

Two centuries before, not all had gone smoothly with the Jesuits who left France bound for the New World. There'd been some difficulties, some martyrs in fact when they attempted to bring Christianity to eastern tribes, Mohawks and Iroquois. Old Ignace was Iroquois, but he was also, through two centuries, Roman Catholic through the through. 

Any missionary society in the New World would have loved to count Ignace La Mouse among their own. After he and others found their way to the Flatheads most of a continent away, and once they started in with some serious trapping, he began telling the locals about the blessings of Christianity, specifically, the specific flavor of Christianity the Jesuits had taught him by way of songs and rituals and, as an example, a determination to keep the Sabbath day holy. 

Old Ignace was no slouch. His heart was big; he commanded respect and trust sufficient to make him a grand exemplar of the Christian faith in this newly adopted faraway country. The stories he told the Flatheads of this white man's faith were so charming, so fundamental, that the Flatheads soon made it clear that they should have their own black robe, someone to come and live with them and be their friend and tell them the good news of the gospel. Soon enough, a quartet of locals--Flatheads and Nez Perce--were duly commissioned with some firelit ritual to travel all the way down river and secure for the people at Flathead Black Robe.  

The destination was obvious. Whenever they bound up their furs and loaded them on canoes, they were off to a place called St. Louis, a French-speaking village where, among the fur-traders, a dozen or more Black Robes were said to live. Old Ignace knew something of Lewis and Clark and believed Mr. Clark, the governor, might be of aid. 

It's difficult to imagine their trip--no rest stops, no fast food, no convenience stores, nary a motel down any stretch of river between the Montana frontier and far away St. Louis. Not only that, but the chosen four were not unaware of the prickly bands of First Nations who called the country home--the Sioux, the Blackfeet, and others--none of whom were known for hospitality. If the four frontiersmen were to keep their scalps all the way to St. Louis, they'd have to know when and where to take cover to avoid, well, slaughter.

The trip took months, but, miraculously, they made it, got down to St. Louis and met with the governor, Mr. William Clark, who pointed them toward the church. Incredibly, that first meeting turned into a Babel thing as no one in the seminary could understand a word the Flatheads said. What's worse, two of them became gravely ill. What then transpired can only be imagined. When those St. Louis Jesuits cared for their guests, they witnessed very strange things, behavior that seemed a miracle. These unintelligible Indigenous from some place far, far away up river were somehow, some way already Roman Catholic. 'T'was true. When the sacrament of baptism was given, they rejoiced. They knew. They understood signs and rituals. When presented with a small cross, they kissed it. They somehow understood, even when their language didn't bring them to understanding.

Sadly, however, two of that Catholic corps of discovery died in St. Louis. When the remaining two pilgrims left, homeward bound, they were alone, no black robe of to return to the people. Their experience had been extraordinary, but by the standars of the people back home, the mission had failed.

But there is more to the story. . .

Tucker's doubtful demise

All the way out here, halfway across the country, over hill and dale of the Alleghenies, through cities like Akron, Chicago, Davenport and Cedar Rapids, then across the fertile Iowa prairie, all the way to the far northwest corner of the state, I swear, this morning, I hear east coast libs partying. "Ding, dong--the witch is dead," they're singing, in chorus, "Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead.

Tucker is out. The biggest of the bigs, the headliner, the talking head King, is gone.

In an amazing turn of events that left the media world in shock, not a single investigative journalist saw the man's demise coming, and everyone--most everyone--was thrilled and overjoyed. MSNBC folks gathered like birds of pray, and the minor leagues of right-wing journalism started sensing a swelling audience and overflowing coffers. 

I can't help thinking, nationally and culturally, Tucker getting dumped is a good, good thing. His determination to blame the full load of all our nation's problems on George Soros and the libs-behind-every-bush got old and tedious and ridiculous  when he looked through the thousands of hours of video (given to him by his buddy Kevin McCarthy) and produced his own summary/interpretation of what happened on January 6--just another day at the office. 

He lived on lies and knew it and did 'em anyway night after night. The Dominion tapes hammered together a coffin Rupert Murdoch laid him in when it became evident Tucker didn't believe what he was saying to his millions of slack-jawed listeners. 

Good riddance. Let me join my voice with the song.

Any number of voices last night made it clear that Rupert Murdoch has no problem sending his own headliners down the road. He did in Glen Beck, the scary Mormon prophet, then Bill O'Reilly, the hate-monger, knocked them both down like bowling pins, instantly shrinking their audience. In their places he set up Tucker, who, in all likelihood, said some unbecoming things about the bosses at Fox, who canned him. 

Bret Stephens, a NY Times columnist, a conservative registered his sadness, not at the death of Tucker but at the death of a dream of a truly conservative network, a line-up of shows in the tradition of William F. Buckley, not would-be bullies like Donald.

Tucker may be gone, or at least dehorned, but his absence won't go unfilled, I'm sure, because someone else will come along and make millions on the fears of white folks in a nation where they're soon to be outnumbered and replaced ("replacement theory," Tucker maintained). Some new voice is out there already sharpening his politics and getting ready to trade on grievances in the hearts of men and women. 

Once upon a time, Herman Melville's "The Lightning-Rod Man" was a kind of best-seller. It was just short story, something of a fable, really, but it somehow found a readership that, during his lifetime, may well have surpassed anything else Melville wrote, including most certainly Moby Dick. I can't help but think it's still not only readable but pertinent. 

In a violent storm that shakes everything in the house, a rain-soaked lightning-rod salesman comes to the door peddling his wears, having long ago realized that he best turns a dollar when he uses a thunderstorm as a backdrop. 

Melville's narrator listens to the man's smooth schtick, then boots him and his wares back out into the storm. The last line of the story is perfectly prescient: "But spite of my treatment, and spite of my dissuasive talk of him to my neighbors, the Lightning−rod man still dwells in the land; still travels in storm−time, and drives a brave trade with the fears of man."

There'll be another Tucker soon, if it isn't Tucker. There's ample room for fear amid the darkness of the human heart. 

The Old Rugged Cross

An Auxiliary robe

 Maybe it was the music. I'd like to think it could have been. After all, some old preachers claim that when Satan was cast out of heaven, he fell directly into the choir loft. I'd like to think it was the music.

Imagine it this way, you're sitting behind the pulpit in a big church in rural Iowa in the 1920s. One hyper member has suggested a new version of  "The Old Rugged Cross," as a way to make room for the fittest symbol of the fancy new patriotic organization you and maybe half the town didn't join, even though a whole lot of the town's muck-a-mucks did. You didn't sign on, even though joining up cost only $24, and, shoot! the hood and the robe and the whole ball of wax come with a membership. And it's become clear why people are with them: this new bunch of righteous men and women want like nothing else to keep America Christian. 

You're skeptical. 

But you're pastor of this fair-to-middlin' church, and you want to tell your congregation that things you've read about the organization aren't exactly endearing. In the South, you know it's African-Americans they're after, and blood's been spilled. But here in town, way up north of the Mason-Dickson, there is only one Black man around and he's, well, special--he just polishes shoes at the hotel downtown. 

And Jews? a couple, not near enough for a temple, a couple of businessmen who came ashore at the turn of the century when a bunch of Russians arrived in northwest Iowa--Sioux City.

Catholics are here though, lots of them, and you know what people say about Catholics--they're the ones peddlin' all the hootch even though the good Christian people of this country finally made a law--Prohibition, you know. They're the ones taking over our jobs.

Could have been any number of things that made him do it, I suppose. But I'd like to think it was the music that got to him, those new lyrics to the old favorite. And even though he probably wasn't the old-fashioned hard-nosed Dutch Reformed dominie of the era, no angry pulpit pounding for him, he can't help turning his face away from those lyrics because they just plain stink. 

What's more, membership is getting to be a thing throughout the whole region--shoot, throughout the entire state of Iowa. More than 40,000 registered Klan members claimed membership in Iowa cities and towns, east to west, north to south. In 1924, 25,000, they say, showed up right here in Sheldon, Iowa--25,000 Klan members right here. This is just a part of it.

"Oh, my, what a wholesome gathering," so many people said, because they wanted to believe that the men and women of the Klan truly love America (yes, women, there's even an auxiliary). They do. They just plain love America. They're patriots. Like the others, people in your church can't help but believe that the dump of immigrants on our shores is soon to destroy our beloved way of life. Shoot, they LOVE America, even say it all the time, won't let you forget it. They do. They love the flag.

Here's what they claim!

 

And you're the Dominie in a good-sized church that, thank the Lord, isn't yet overrun with Klansmen and women. But there's been this request for "The Bright Fiery Cross, and you've got to deal with it so you determine, prayerfully, to take it head on. On the next Sabbath morning, you stand up before them and tell your congregation, from the pulpit, that, in their own best interests, it's good and pleasing in the sight of the Lord to stay more an arm's length away, if not more, from those people who hate, even though some of the town's most outstanding citizens have signed up because they claim that all of this is borne from their immense love of America. "You best stay away," you tell your congregation, quietly and sincerely, from the pulpit of First Reformed Church, Sheldon, Iowa, before you point at the hymnal and tell the people to sing the old hymn, the old way. 

He warned them. He told them, from the pulpit, to be very wary--that's what he said, that's what he told his congregation.

And just a night or two later, a bright fiery cross burned on the church lawn.

______________________ 

I'm greatly thankful for the help of Millie Vos, at the Sheldon (IA) Prairie Museum for the story, the pictures, and the anecdotes. 40,000 Iowans were members of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 90

“Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, 

that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.” Psalm 90

 

Received an e-mail from old friends a while back, who told me the news of their son, their oldest child, who, at 53, started feeling a bit weak, they say, a few weeks ago, and therefore went in for tests. The tests turned up something significant, and he was sent to a specialist, who identified the problem as ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.

 You can imagine their shock.

 But all is not hopeless. Some who suffer ALS keep going for a very long time. Others, of course, don’t. “Won't get into numbers,” his mother wrote. Right now, their son “has to be pulled up out of his big comfortable chair if he wants to get up. Has to use a walker. Totally weak arms and legs so far. Can hardly pick up his arm or hold spoons when he eats. We go see him......often.”

 He has three little grandchildren who live almost next door. “They perk him up,” the note says. His wife is wonderful and caring.  She pushes the wheelchair when they go anywhere. And then this: “So........... it is finally sinking in to me that this is happening to our oldest ‘child.’ I seem to call him ‘Danny Boy’ now.”

 And what about him? What about Danny Boy? “He will enjoy each day as they go along.”

 Ironically, most of us wish we could say that.

 That Moses would write this line, that makes sense: “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.” His people rarely were.

 It’s hard to read the story of the Exodus and not be anti-Semitic. After all that God had done for them--taking down Pharaoh and his minions in the Red Sea, then establishing his own tent right there among them thereby granting him the glory of his presence—miraculous, really! But those Israelites, never satisfied, still found things to bitch about.

 Yahweh splashes manna around every morning, and they want duck in wine sauce. He gives them duck and they want sirloin. Is it any wonder they annoyed him. Should we be shocked that he told them an entire generation had to die before he’d bring them home? Seriously, the Israelites give Jews a bad name.

 

Once, at a burning bush, God instructed Moses to speak for him—and, in a way speak for his people before Pharaoh. In Psalm 90, that’s what he’s doing, speaking for them in Psalm 90:14, maybe especially here, as well as all of us. He’s asking for something few of us ever feel—true, rich satisfaction. Maybe lions get it; after all, they sleep away ninety percent of their lives. But do any of us? I don’t.

I don’t know Danny-boy, his kids, his darling grandkids or his loving, caring wife. But I know his parents, and I know at least something of their sadness and their great and totally understandable fears. I wish they weren’t suffering as they are and will. I wish Danny Boy wasn’t dying. I wish those grandkids weren’t losing a grandfather. Things just aren’t right in the world. There are always things to get angry about.

 

Moses’s prayer resonates with anyone in human skin; we all know the impulse very well of the unquenchable thirst for love, for nothing less than satisfaction. “Satisfy us,” he begs of God. It’s a song we all sing, every day and every night of our lives.

 

Except, oddly, Danny Boy, who will, as he says, “enjoy each day as they go along.”          

Except maybe him and some few like him.

 

Maybe better than the rest of us, they understand this great old psalm. 

St. Donatus -- v

So let this son of the Calvinists try to begin to bring all this St. Donatus home.

Once long ago, four hearty pioneers made their way north and west of Pella, Iowa, in hopes of discovering an empty chunk of land for a Dutch Reformed colony in the last unsettled region of the state of Iowa. The story goes that they looked around, thought seriously about land around Cherokee and the Little Sioux River, then hiked farther north and west, where trees were at a premium and the only ready building material was sod from the vast, treeless prairies all around. The year was 1870.

When they returned from their scouting trip what they considered "open" land (it was morally acceptable and hugely convenient to simply write off the Yanktons as heathen and, thus, make them expendable), they brought the good tidings back to the saints in Pella and soon began to organize a return to stake out some of that fine, cheap land for themselves. I'm sure, as the pilgrimage began, the elders beseeched the Creator and Heaven and Earth to accompany them and bless their expedition to what they would like to think of is their own holy land. Holy Writ was read, I'm sure.

At almost exactly the same time, May of 1870, a train of 18 covered wagons, manned and womaned by Luxembourgians, Roman Catholics all, left a town they'd established in the 1840s, not unlike Pella, a town they'd named St. Donatus, and a church where, in 1861, they'd created an outdoor "Stations of the Cross," that still exists on the edge of a steep hill behind the church. I can't imagine that, as the pilgrimage began, the elders didn't likewise beseech the Creator of Heaven and Earth to accompany them, to watch over them, to keep them from harm in the frontier they wanted to domesticate for a new colony of believers.

The place they still honor as the half-acre where the new settlers built their first church is no more than a half-dozen miles from a village named for a Dutch hero, a place called Orange City, Iowa. 

Just inside the front door of St. Mary's school in Alton stands a statue of the Blessed Virgin, holding the Christ child. Imagine--150 years ago that statue came with. When the wagon train hit river beds--the most dangerous moments on the trek--the pioneers carried the Blessed Virgin in their arms, their precious cargo wrapped in blankets. Nothing in its brightly-painted visage today suggests wear-and-tear or the memory of a month-long, arduous trip all the way across the Iowa prairie.

It's perfectly clear that both groups of believers suffered the same pestilences--three years worth of grasshoppers that ate everything and sent some of the pioneers from both colonies back east, stoutly convinced no one could live in god-forsaken land. They'd never felt the cold as severely in the valleys and forests along the Mississippi. Always, always, in January cold descended from the Artic Circle. In July heat, the sheer persecution of incessant winds were unbearable. When an Orange City preacher told relatives far away that life was impossible here, the most powerful man in the colony found a way to send him on his way. He's buried in South Dakota.

 Is there really any reason to believe that Orange City prayers were any less intense than those offered in Alton or Remsen? 

For a few years, Catholics in Alton could hold mass only when a visiting priest would happen through. In order to celebrate Christmas in the closest church (in LeMars), pioneer families had to get out the oxen and begin the long trek at midnight, the night before. 

Their first church, built in East Orange Township in 1881, on eight acres of farmland donated by a member of the church, was named--not surprisingly--St. Donatus. 

My dad's antipathy toward Luxembourgian entrepreneurs who ran the company where he worked, was borne, in large part from the 400 years of church history he'd come heir to, a history that began with the Reformation in Europe and a heritage of distrust for Roman Catholics, who insisted on fish on Fridays and endless repetitions of the Rosary. He had little tolerance for religious Catholics, priests and nuns, and, at times, hinted, giggling at furtive groanings in rectory. Having said all of that, I think it important to say that my father was a loving man, a quiet soul, a deep believer in his Lord God almighty. He found his bosses' personal behavior offensive--they were heavy drinkers; and, I believe, blamed the absence of piety he found it difficult to look past on nothing more or less than their being Roman Catholic. 

I don't think my dad was all that much different than other Dutch Calvinists of his time--he may have even been more tolerant than others. 

I've been thinking about St. Donatus and statues and stained glass and the Stations of the Cross, been visiting local Catholic churches in an effort to define bigotry people like myself have, something entirely separate from thoughtful doctrinal differences. I've come to believe that the Roman Catholics around me are better at using story than are those whose Protestant tradition gives them identity. Sola Scriptura is all about "reading" the Bible, not necessarily about "seeing" its great stories.

Good Friday, the passion of Christ, is more clearly readable in Remsen St. Mary's than it is in Covenant CRC. Christ's Resurrection shines through the stained glass on Easter morning. I don't think either side have a monopoly on piety. There are  fully as many "cradle Catholics" in Alton than there are and "cradle Calvinists" or cradle Protestants" in Orange City. But righteousness dies when our regards turn to ourselves.

One of the greatest stories about St. Donatus Church in St. Donatus, Iowa, is that the Stations of the Cross that meander up that steep hillside behind the church were constructed in 1861 by a group from both churches, the Catholics on one edge of the valley and the Lutherans a mile away. Look again and for yourself at the picture of the two churches that share the same valley. They stand a mile apart, but not really. Even these days, on Good Friday, men and women and children from both churches take up their crosses and pilgrimage together.

(One more day. There's yet more to say.)

St. Donatus -- iv

He's little more than a boy here, in stained glass; but then St. Donatus never did grow old. Two decades into life, and he'd become a war hero; but he was just a kid when he was martyred for his faith by the Emperor's vengeful granddaughter.

And so the story, with his bones, might have been put to rest were it not for a Jesuit named Balthazar Balloni, who discovered the them in the catacombs of St. Agnes, beneath the stone that stated clearly, "St. Donatus, Martyr." Father Balloni asked and was granted permission to take the few relics he found--a skull, smaller bones, a rusted sword, three aged chain links--to his monastery, where he, and I suppose others, preserved and venerated them.

A brand new church in Muenstereifel was in need of relics, so the powers-that-be determined, 1500 years after Donatus's death, that the young soldier's remains be given their own place, in this new church. The Jesuits directed the transfer and sent yet another priest, Father Heerde to meet Fr. Hannes, who undertaken the entire transfer as a ceremonial processional.

When Father Hannes left Rome, on his celebratory way to Muenstereifel, he determined to overnight in a small town two hours or so away. Clearly all around, threatening skies were about to empty. Fr. Hannes determined to place the relics in a church, the church of St. Martin, where he met the envoy, Fr. Heerde.

So far, so good. But the next morning, the storm descended in great fury during mass celebrated by Fr. Heerde. 

Honestly, what of this is true and what of it is legend of this entirely sainted tale can never be satisfactorily determined. That St. Donatus's story builds upon itself throughout the world and the centuries is as much a given as it proof of its acceptance by the faithful. 

The storm, little more than a husky threat the night before, descended with what parishioners who'd come to church that morning might have considered nothing sheer malice, and just at the moment of final blessing, the moment when Fr. Heerde raised his hands over the congregation, lightning struck--not just the church, but the immense altar itself. Father Heerde was lit with an unholy flame, his vestments, all his clothing on fire.

Remember--all of this is 1649. Afar off in the New World, factions are forming to begin to fight what will become the French and Indian War. In England, Charles I, after a tumultuous reign, lost his head for treason. In Maryland, "An Act Concerning Religion" was adopted to deal with religious freedom in the new world, a significant and almost forgotten prelude to the First Amendment. 

When lightning struck, Fr. Heerde became his own votive candle. In his terrifying suffering, he cried out, "Saint Donatus, pray for me."

If you wonder how those statues in Iowa village called St. Donatus, Iowa, which is home to St. Donatus Church, a place where you'll find him, up front at a place of spiritual significance, as well as a richly decorated statue of a young Roman soldier in a bed-and-breakfast across the street, consider an unforgettable event at the Church of St. Martin, in a small German town named Euskirchen, where immediately--immediately!--after invoking the help of a deceased young Roman whose dusty bones sat right beside him, a Jesuit named Father Heerde found himself miraculously saved from what everyone present recognized as a horrific, fiery death. Not only were his clothes untouched, his burns were healed in the twinkling of a young soldier's eye.

By the time those relics were safely transported to the church at Muenstereifel, they were--as you can imagine--already greatly celebrated; and it's there, at a church at Muenstereifel, Germany, where they abide yet today, a place named, quite appropriately, St. Donatus Church. 

And yes, he's there too.

St. Donatus -- iii

Just so happens that right now, somewhere ten miles away--so says my weather program--there's considerable lightning. At that distance, the thunder isn't much more than a grumble. But there's a storm close enough to flash up against the thick cloudiness. Oh, my, can we use the rain.

For the record, it's a St. Donatus morning, the world outside my window flashing its occasional grouchiness. If I understand my saints right, should that storm come any closer, should our windows rattle or the downpour even suggest the river flooding, my prayers for deliverance might find their way to the throne of God a bit more quickly if, hands folded, I were I to ask this man, St. Donatus, thunderbolts in his arm, to plead my pleading for me, with me. 

He is not Luxembourgian. He's a Roman, a good one too, a righteous soul, a comely young man, afraid of nothing and sworn to good works, a saint. The Donatus up top the page greets worshippers just inside the front doors of a very European-looking cathedral in Remsen, a small, Iowa town twenty minutes away. The statue was a gift from an actual Luxembourgian, not an emigrant, a man who wanted to find some long-lost relative who'd left the old country a century ago. When locals helped and found the grave, the real Luxembourgian sent them a Donatus.

This legendary young martyr once saved the entire garrison when the Romans were surrounded by fierce Germanic forces during the Marcommanic Wars, which began--hold your breath--in 166. You read that right. Marcus Aurelius's forces got themselves besieged by Vandals, choked to near-death without food and water.

Now, just for a moment, think Elijah and the prophets of Baal. First, the Roman heathens called on their gods for relief. Nothing. Their suffering continued. But one of the heathens mentioned Donatus, who wasn't the only Christian among the Roman troops. Why not try the Christians? Donatus gathered the other believers, prayed intensely, implored the Lord for his aid. 

First, low-and-behold, clouds lofted their way, then thunder and rain that washed life back to Roman weariness, as well as heavy bolts of lightning not unlike the ones he's holding, bolts that tore the enemy into pieces. Those who weren't slain fled madly, the prayers of the Christians, young Donatus especially, creating a miracle that flipped a sure Roman defeat into impossible triumph and turned the young Christian soldier into a national hero.

All of which made him even more attractive to Miss Alexandria--remember her? The Emperor's granddaughter begged him to let her have the hero, to get him for her at any cost. The Emperor entreated Donatus's mother to persuade her son to give himself to Alexandria. But she too was a woman of faith and thusly advised Donatus to stay with the covenant he had made with the Creator of Heaven and Earth and refuse to give in, no matter what Alexandria was offering. 

And so he did. He said no, God helping him.

Incensed, Alexandria demanded Donatus' publicly affirm his adoration for Jupiter. When he didn't and wouldn't, she told her grandfather the young and handsome war hero would not worship the true gods. With the Emperor's permission, she ordered him to her house, where he was put in chains, then executed right before her eyes.

When his mother heard the news, she took his body and laid it in a cemetery named for St. Agnes. But then, as you can guess, the young Christian soldier in the Roman army was not truly dead. His heart had stopped beating, blood no longer flowed through his arteries, his eyes were closed in death--all true. But he still had life.

The story goes that sometime in the 1850s, when the church at St. Donatus, Iowa, was looking for a name, the diocese told them there were already a sufficient number of Catholic churches named for the Blessed Virgin. Instead they might well honor some other saint. They chose a young Roman soldier who proved his mettle in love and war, who never reneged on a promise he made to his Savior. They gave their church the name "St. Donatus." 

And there he is, all the way across the state, in Remsen St. Mary's church, right inside the door, where you can't easily miss him.

Yes, there's more to the story.  

St. Donatus -- ii

In the late 1840s, a Luxembourgian immigrant named Peter Gehlen constructed a limestone house in a brand new village named St. Donatus. It's still there, in fact, although today it's a B and B and ale house right downtown, a domicile that, in fine European tradition, was built long ago to function as both barn and home.

That's where you'll find the handsome, young Roman soldier standing right there inside the front door, "courtesy of the St. Donatas Historical  Society," or so the sign beside him says. I didn't grow up with patron saints like this one--"patron saint of storms," the sign says. It takes some considerable work for me to see how a young man born somewhere around 166 (that's not a typo) could hold down such honorable positions in a tiny burg planted solidly in the U. S. of A., just off the west bank of the mighty Mississippi.  

Donatus's saintliness has a story, as you can well imagine, and, yes, there's a woman in it, a beautiful young libertine, more than a little spoiled, who wants what she can't have, specifically that young handsome soldier her Emperor grandfather respects as an aid and a military leader. You may have heard of her grandfather, Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Two thousand years later, what of the tale is legend and what is fact cannot be determined; but the tale that still is told, as you might expect, poses sinful passions going to battle with passions of the soul. 

The stories lack the literal sensuality of Last Tango--after all, we're talking about a saint here. But enough is said to allow the imagination to create filmy bedclothes in candle-lit rooms and sufficient comeliness to make young Donatus sweat. But the kid had sworn a vow of perpetual virginity that he simply would not break. 

Thus, the young soldier remained true to his confessions, held tight the sacred pledges he had made after God had answered his prayer; and he died, a martyr, for the pious commitment that little, harmful hussy couldn't shake, no matter what she tried. It's a plot line that doesn't wander far from the tale of wunderkind Joseph thusly besieged in the bedroom of Pharoah's wife. 

St. Donatus holds a palm branch in his left hand, signifying his martyrdom. Emperor Aurelius couldn't turn down his dandy granddaughter and, subject to her charms, drew his sword. For his unshakeable spiritual commitments, St. Donatus earned a central position in the altar in the church across the street, as well as a significant place just inside the door of a 170-year old B and B just off Main.  

"Patron saint of storms," that handwritten sign reads, which explains the lightening bolts in his right hand on the image in the church, and the figures etched on shield he holds in the sculpture in the inn across the street.

According to the version of Calvinist history I was taught, praying to saints was not only misguided, it was sinful. I'll confess that even today the whole relationship between believers and patron saints seems a stretch.

But those bolts of lightning is a visual reminder that there's more to the story. 

St. Donatus - i

I suppose he's an unlikely character to appear at the center of the altar of an old Catholic church in what appears to be an ancient European village but is little more than a tiny town just south of Dubuque. He's something of a surprise because he appears to be a Roman soldier and, in fact, is--or was--and there lies the tale. 

It's St. Donatus, who stands at the heart of the altar of a church named after him in a town named after him. In one hand, he holds a palm branch, and in the other what seems a handful of bolts of lightning. St. Donatus of Muenstereifel (as opposed to a dozen other St. Donatus-es) was, in fact, a Roman soldier, young, bold, courageous, charismatic, but something of an outlier because he had been raised Christian by his widowed mom--and that made all the difference.

The older I get, the more I enjoy Roman Catholic iconography, the old-fashioned pageantry of the saints and their incredible, mythic stories. I'm not about to convert, but the role of religion in our lives grows more mysterious every time I step into an old Catholic church like the one in St. Donatus, Iowa, where the house of worship clings to the edge of a hill so steep that climbing is all but impossible if there's been any rain at all. 

As a portrait, this shot from the rear may be somewhat unbecoming; but the valley is grand, isn't it? And the Lutheran church way out there on the other side is very much worth mentioning--so much well-meant religiosity, two huge and greatly beloved churches packed into little more than a half mile, not a city in sight.

The fact is, people do climb the rugged hill behind St. Donatus Catholic Church in St. Donatus, Iowa. They climb the steep edge because out there, clearly established for pilgrims is a rugged path that takes believers past the Stations of the Cross, one of very few outdoor stations anywhere in America. Almost certainly, those paths would have been full of people had you and I been there on Good Friday last. 

No one, I'm sure, would approximate the arduous and unforgiving path up the side of the hill to the horrific passion of Christ; but if you take up one of the wooden crosses left conveniently at the start, if you carry a cross like one of these with you, you'll know, once you've come back down the hill, that you've been on a journey.

Call it a "roots" thing. I can't help but think it odd that in the two places where I've lived most of my life, I've been in little Dutch Reformed hamlets right beside similarly sized clans of Luxembourgers. Never had much to do with them, but my dad worked with them and for them for years when I was a kid, and, as can be imagined, never really got along well, a Calvinist in St. Donatus's court. Look at that space between St. Donatus church and the Lutherans on the other side of the road--we're not the same even if we're cut from the same cloth. Piety has its own record of wrongs.

I want to know more about my Luxembourgian  neighbors here in Siouxland, the same neighbors we had some 500 miles east on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. 

A good place to start is with St. Donatus, of St. Donatus, this Roman soldier and martyr. My religious history, as often told, begins with nailed-up thesis on the door at Wittenburg. This young Roman soldier makes the Reformation feel like something close to yesterday. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

 

“Relent, O LORD! How long will it be?

Have compassion on your servants.” Psalm 90:13

 

The very heart of this famous old poem is “how long?” If you want to understand Psalm 90’s centuries’-old soulful appeal, then understand this about Moses, who’s doing the singing: he has fallen deeply into the black hole of God’s absence: “Relent, O LORD! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants.” Moses is estranged, as all of us are at one time or another. He’s in a lane with Mother Teresa, who—hard as it is to believe--spent much of her life feeling far, far, far from God’s own presence. God is gone.

 

And what happens to us in that black hole? What happens when we understand that our days are, in fact, as numbered as the Moses says, that we won’t escape the sentence of death? We change: our values alter, our vision skews.

 

Every single one of the dozen verses that precede this line proclaim God’s omnipotence, testify to his eternal strength, his timeless care. But Moses isn’t sweet-talking, currying favor. He’s throwing himself before a God who he can’t help believing just isn’t there, and who has, for no understandable reason, turned his face away.

 

What this line describes is the doleful emotional color of God’s absence. Moses is sure he has been rejected, forgotten; and the desperation which God’s absence creates prompts the self-less prayer of the first dozen verses. “Without you we are nothing, Lord—please return to our lives.” That’s the story of the moment.

 

And it may well explain why this old Psalm reads so rewardingly at funerals. It isn’t just the references to sixty or seventy years; it’s more than that. With death’s imminence setting right beside us—the coffin itself—grief obliterates most every joy. Christ may well have conquered death when he arose on Easter, but death’s sting is never a pin-prick. We feel left behind, the world more dismal.

 

The power of this old psalm is the despair Moses feels in thinking himself and his people so abandoned, something akin to what we feel when we lose someone we love. In the entire poem, he’s telling God what God must do, not because he fears God won’t do what he should, but because he can’t simply hold back his own tongue. The pain is that deep That’s how much he hurts.

 

“How long?” he says in verse 13. “Have compassion on your servants.”

 

He’s begging, imploring, even demanding, his back to the wall.

 

Where there’s probably a casket.

 

“You are our everything, Lord—where on earth are you? Please come back!?”

Minis and their record

Truth be told, Mary Quant, the fashion designer who died this week in London, created her most striking fashion statement in the mid-60s, when the young women she served--she wasn't French-fashion highbrow, not in the least--kept demanding -- I don't know how to say this -- that their hemlines be, well, raised. And raised. And raised. "Higher," they insisted, and the skirts she created went up to perfectly scandalous heights.

Mary Quant's great contribution to world fashion?--"the mini-skirt," set our tongues a' waggin'. All that exposed thigh had to be a signal of the end times. "Who can know what evil passions will be loos'd?" we said when first we saw what little there was of them--perfectly vulgar. Wen the press asked Mary Quant what she thought of those accusations of her "vulgarity," you can't believe what she said.

"Why, I love vulgarity," she told them. There, Satan's evil imprint was right there in Quant's hiked hemlines. We were cascading into worldliness, having departed so shamelessly from faith of our mothers. (Fathers' assessments were just a bit less vehement.) Miss Quant told those reporters there was life where there was vulgarity, only stagnation elsewhere. "I love vulgarity," she said. 

That's exactly what she said. Can you imagine?

At Christian institutions of higher learning, Deportment Departments laid down rules of conduct on slabs of stone, rules like this one: slacks were unbecoming and didn't offer the dignity young women should nurture. Thus, for class, slacks were not permitted.  

I don't know that any dorm matrons ever pulled out a tape yard stick to measure the number of inches a skirt may have ventured above the knee. But minis sort of caught on at those campuses--they became the fashion, you know. Know what else? --the boys rather loved the irony: minis were okay but slacks were verboten. Made absolutely no sense, but was, to the boys, perfectly wonderful. A full menu of short skirts.  

Soon enough, even the most draconian Deportment Departments had to concede. After all, skirts kept rising, and the onus of slacks seemed, even to the most puritanical, as plainly idiotic. 

Trust me, the good Christian boys lost big time on that one. The girls won and did so going away, and that was the beginning. Now we're closer to end times because ever since, it's been "women-this and women-that." Women preachers?--why not? 

Put them in pants and anything goes. Isn't that how it went? All of it started with that vulgar mini. Mary Quant has passed away, you say?--well, good. Look at the evil the woman unleashed.

Cloning

I must have been about his age, maybe seventh grade. I'd bought a used Argus C-3, a rangefinder camera with a fairly sharp lens--for the times, of course. That old brick of a camera offered possibilities I didn't fully understand, so my Sunday School teacher dropped by one day. He was a photographer--you know, school shots, weddings, family portraits. He knew what he was doing and somehow he'd discovered that I wanted to learn. So he dropped by. I remember exactly where he stood on our front lawn when he drew out the scheme.

It looked just like the drawing on the crumpled paper above, the wastepaper I'm about to toss. Same thing. He started with the science of the camera. "A photograph," he told me, "is composed of two variables--time and light." The more light you have, the less time you need; and visa-versa. If I shot with a closed aperture, I needed greater shutter speed. Okay.

I was into photography, largely because a friend of mine had given me a homemade photo enlarger. I'd mixed up developer and fixer, and slowly learned how to develop shots from the C-3 negatives. Something almost magic appeared in that process, and it took some diligence to turn out images that were worth looking at, not just girls in bikinis. My darkroom was in the basement.

In all seriousness, my dad told me he had a few questions about whether or not being a photographer was a vital "kingdom calling"--you know, "does the Lord God almighty want you taking pictures of school kids? Maybe he'd rather have you being their teacher."

(I'm sure Dad never considered photography as art.)

So education it was, but I never really lost interest in photography. In 1976, before the Schaaps moved from Arizona to Iowa, I bought a real single-lens reflex camera. 

Twenty years ago, I missed early morning forays into the country, the kind of thing I used to do a lot when I was my grandson's age. So I started getting up early on Saturday and driving around, armed with a camera. Photography teaches you how to see, Dorothea Lange used to say. It's good for the soul. It is.

Last week, a dozen elegant trumpeter swans were on the river, or so I was told. I pulled out my camera, stuck on the huge 400mm lens, and took my grandson out. Had never tried to shoot living things before. I put his pictures on a thumb drive so he could take them home. 

He came back to our place again last Friday. I'd hauled out my old Canon DSLR and was ready simply to give it to him. I took him downstairs, told him about all the eagles out at the river park, let him known he could use this old Canon of mine, and we could go out there. Then I started in a lecture that began with the diagram on that scrap of paper at the top of the page, the one my Sunday School teacher/photographer had used out there on our front lawn.

'T'was painfully clear he wasn't particularly interested. 

My grandfather, by all reports, was a better after-dinner speaker than he was a preacher, but then most preachers weren't all that good in the years he occupied a pulpit. They didn't have to be; they were dominies.

I don't think my dad ever thought much about the ministry. He was, as was his father, a greatly religious man, however. When Grandpa Schaap looked over his boys--four of them--and didn't see a one whose eyes were on the ministry, he might have felt a touch of sadness. 

I'm happy to say that I'm not my father either. As often as I've written about paternity issues--two novels, a collection of short stories--I've thought a lot about it.

I probably don't need to say that my son--the Oklahoma fire-fighter--isn't me either. And that's a good thing, don't you think? 

If we could order up doppelgangers, the world would be choking with clones. What interested me when I was in seventh grade is not what interests my grandson, sixty-some years later. That old Canon of mine comes with three lenses. It's a good old camera that could teach him a lot, but there are no Legos in the bag. With Legos he's in his own world. 

I'm enough of a Calvinist to believe that the idea of his loving photography was, from the get-go, my dream, not his. Call it pride--that's what it is. I wanted him to be me, and I'm guessing this morning, that Canon still here on floor behind me, that I'm not the sole sinner on that score.  

And I can't help myself either. This morning, I'm thinking, you know?--maybe when he's in eighth grade.