White Man goes to Wounded Knee (v)

That afternoon, when the shooting ended, Army personnel loaded 39 of their wounded into wagons, along with their dead, 25. Fifty-one wounded Sioux were located, 47 of them women and children, some of whom—like six of the cavalry survivors—would soon succumb to their injuries. The Sioux dead were left on the field and in the ravines, but exactly how many had been killed will never be known. Native people consider 300 a fairly just estimate.

That night, a blizzard came in on the wind and laid a gossamer veil over the carnage—some say mercifully; some think the hand of white man’s God was simply covering their sin. Wounded Knee was the final military action in the Plains Indians Wars, the horrid, bloody conclusion of a cultural and religious confrontation that, from my vantage point, a white man at Wounded Knee, looks even today like something obscenely inevitable. Millions of white people—my own Dutch immigrant ancestors among them—went west for cheap land they assumed the Sioux didn’t value. After all, where were the improvements, the tree lines, the fences, the buildings, the cut sod? Millions of white people—my own ancestors among them—thought our holy book to a pagan people was a generous gift for the millions of acres those people had once roamed in freedom. My own family included, we wanted to own what they wanted to honor.

But the Lakota people lost far more than those buried on the hill where we’re standing. They lost what the cavalry and the government called “the battle”; they lost the war; they lost their way of life. “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard,” Black Elk says. “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

There’s more. You must have noticed because you can’t have missed what’s right in front of us—what’s been there the whole time we’ve been watching what happened. Be careful as you walk around on that promontory because a crumbling block foundation, scattered with crumpled beer cans and trash, marks the outline of what was once a Catholic church, right there where those Hotchkiss guns rained death on the council circle. It’s crumbling, as things do that are not preserved.

The church that once stood here was destroyed in the 1973 Wounded Knee conflict, when, once more, violence occurred not far from where we’re standing. Men and women who held radically different views of Native dignity squared off against each other in this very valley. That dispute brought in U. S. Marshalls and turned deadly, when armed wasicu, here, once again, dug in like the cavalry. For many, those government marshalls were here to defend tribal leaders some thought violent, despotic men who’d long ago sold their souls for fools’ gold.

It isn’t pretty—this crumbling shell. There’s nothing to suggest that what once stood above ground here represented—even offered—the Prince of Peace.

In Coventry, England, you can walk within the skull-like remains of a cathedral destroyed by Nazi bombs during World War II, a remarkable memento of Brit suffering during relentless air strikes. Coventry Cathedral is what much of Europe looked like after Hitler. That foundation is immense, its walls rise and fall jaggedly. But its perimeters are festooned with plaques and flowers and all kinds of memorials neatly commemorating suffering and heroism.

No walls still stand on the foundation half-buried in the crest of the hill where we’re standing. No memorials—just graffiti—decorate what’s there. No one keeps the place up, so what’s left deteriorates in the abusive hands of changing prairie seasons. You can walk into that foundation, if you dare. The empty shell of the church that once looked over the field where hundreds died is nothing at all like the monument at Coventry.

And yet it is. It’s just not sanitized. But then, nothing is at Wounded Knee. Today, there is very little to mark the spot, beyond the sign on the road and the old monument behind us. There is a circular visitors’ center down the hill to the east, the pit toilets stand just outside. The center itself is black, and it’s likely you’ve parked beside it before you walked up the hill to the burial monument. In the summer, the place is open. You can wander into its dark confines, where various displays will tell part of the story. But most of the year you’ll find a padlock on the door, which means you’re on your own at Wounded Knee.

Now look down at the sign where the reservation roads cross, three hundred yards from where we’re standing. In summer, you might see a car or two. Go ahead. Walk down. People there beneath a brush arbor—Sioux people—will be happy to sell you some keepsake from your visit.

I have one—a little cowhide drum, two inches across, decorated with beaded fringe and hand-painted on both sides—on one, the image of a red drum; on the other, the words “Wounded Knee” painted in above a single eagle feather, two dates, one on either side—“1890” and “1973.”

Cost me twenty dollars. I bought it from an angular man in a Western shirt who had three of them strung over his hand when he showed me his goods. His dark, expressionless face was pockmarked, his eyes blood-lit. I am sad to say he looked far too much like the caricature some of us hold of reservation people today.

“My wife makes them,” he told me slowly, handing me the one that now hangs on my wall. He pointed into an old Ford parked just ten feet away. I looked into the interior where she was sitting on the passenger’s side. She didn’t move, her head bowed as if she were asleep. Maybe it was my own sinful prejudice, but I couldn’t help think the worst.

I picked a crisp twenty out of my billfold and handed it to him. He took it and left. I suppose the next day he would return with the other two he’d shown me.

I don’t know that I can unpack the whole meaning of that single twenty-dollar transaction—what percentage of what I gave him may have come from pity, what percentage from blood guilt, what percentage from the very real desire to take some icon home to remember Wounded Knee. I honestly cannot interpret my own motives, in part because I don’t know that I want to look that closely into my own heart.

But I’m happy that little cowhide drum is here beside me as I write these words, not because it’s cute—it isn’t. I have no doubt that some enterprising wasicu could create a kiosk and churn out Wounded Knee kitsch far more marketable—refrigerator magnets, ball-point pens with pinto ponies that run up and down the shaft. But there’s something about the people who sold it to me that I can’t forget, just as surely as the tawny prairie landscape all around and the entire awful story that gives the valley its ghostly life. Mystery and the sadness are here in my little buckskin drum, a drum that really doesn’t sound.

Mostly, at Wounded Knee, there is silence. When you visit, you won’t read or hear many words at all. If you’re white and you want to understand, you’ll have to look deeply into your own heart, stare into your deepest values, listen to the songs you sing, examine the history your family has lived and the faith you celebrate.

Maybe it’s best to simply to simply stand in awe at Wounded Knee and pray with your silence. That’s not easy. We’re not good at lamentations. White folks would much rather see Wounded Knee as a battle than a massacre, as we have, officially, for more than a century.

Look up. Somewhere in that vast azure dome a jet will be cutting a swath across the openness. Inside, three hundred people are sipping Cokes, reading Danielle Steele, watching a movie. Some are sleeping. Some are traveling home.

Do the math. Count them yourself—the thousands each day that only incidentally glance out from corner-less airplane windows as they pass over the spot we’re standing. Then look around and see how alone you are up here on the hill with four silent Hotchkiss guns.

Maybe we’d all rather not know. We’d all rather fly over Wounded Knee.

Visit sometime. Leave the kids at home. Welcome the silence. Stand here for an hour until the keening, the death songs, rise from the ravines as they once did. Look out over nearly a thousand ghosts assembled in space so open it’s almost frightening.

Stand here alone for a while, and I swear that what you’ll read in the flow of prairie grasses and hear in the spirit of the wind is that, really, despite the tracks of those jets in the skies above and the immensity of silence all around, once upon a time every last one of us was here.

White Man at Wounded Knee (iv)

 

Somewhere on the peripheries of the council circle stands a man variously described as half-crazed or desperate. He was, by all accounts, a man of faith, a medicine man, who considered it his duty to advise the men in council circle of their dignity and their calling. One account describes him this way: “. . .a grand figure. . .with green-colored face and a yellow nose, terrifying to behold. He wore with pride his floating crown of eagle feathers, while his costume was a wonder of wild adornments.” Some name this man Yellow Bird, while others claim Yellow Bird was nowhere near Big Foot’s camp. Whatever his identity, his eccentric look and behavior calls upon the dignity of Lakota history and culture. What he espouses is at least something of the doctrine of the Ghost Dance. He tells the men not to fear. As Crazy Horse, by legend, once exhorted his men before Little Big Horn, this man reportedly cried and sang to his people, told them this was a good day to fight and a good day to die. He promises eternal life.

The sound produced in Native songs and chants begins in the front of the throat; for centuries, white musicians have been exhorted to sing from the diaphragm. The difference is startling. To white folks unaccustomed to the keening, me among them, the sound produced seems more like a shriek than a hymn. As you stand there, those Hotchkiss guns poised just beneath you, listen the medicine man’s seemingly mad music and try to stop your fists from tightening.

“The men are hiding guns,” an officer says.

It’s December, still early in the morning, and the Sioux men are wrapped in blankets. A search follows. In a pile in the middle, almost seventy old rifles lie over each other like fallen branches.

Then, something happens—nobody knows exactly what. The bluecoats draw their rifles and swords. Rifle magazines click open and close; guns are brought into position to fire.

A single troop—who knows who? —tried to wrestle Black Coyote, one of the Sioux men. Some say he was deaf. At the same moment, the medicine man gets to his feet, picks up a handful of dust, and throws it at the soldiers, his shrieking exhortation continuing in the Sioux language. The soldier and Black Coyote wrestle for the possession of a rifle, while down the line another soldier begins struggling with another for a rifle wrapped in the blanket covering one of three young men standing close together. The medicine man keeps telling his people white bullets will not harm them.

One shot. Whose was it? Did it come from Black Coyote in the struggle? No one knows for sure. But in a moment all hell broke loose, and, for less than a half hour, what follows is a fierce and bloody battle waged hand-to-hand in a council circle soon choked by dust and smoke, and thick with bullets, most of them from army issue rifles, bullets that flew indiscriminately, killing many of the Sioux in the middle, as well as bluecoats on either side. That the cavalry could have avoided shooting each other at such close quarters seems impossible, despite claims to the contrary in military hearings conducted later.

An old woman who used to live down our street claims that out here on the prairie we get only about ten sweet days a year. Prairie cold locks life in its frigid jaws; the heat wilts anything that grows; and always, the wind blows. In the summer, it’s capable of sand-blasting your face; in the winter, its bite is not only dangerous but deadly. But that morning, December 29, 1890, the wind stood still. When you look down now, from the promontory where the First and Second Artillery have been firing those Hotchkiss guns into the horror beneath them, imagine a cloud of dust and smoke so thick as to stop breath. In seconds, in the very middle of the fray, combatants cannot see each other, but blindness doesn’t stop the killing. Seventeen miles away, at the Pine Ridge Agency, people claimed to hear the firing.

Just exactly who fired first might never be established, but there is no question whose rifles ended the massacre. With the first shots, hundreds of Lakota women and children run away into that ravine you see just beyond the fighting. With dozens of their own down in the middle of the madness, Forsyte’s men are in no mood to take prisoners, so for several hours after the bloody combat that began in front of Big Foot’s tent, scattered gunfire continues as far as three miles away, up and down the ravines that cut through the tawny prairie around the creek called Wounded Knee. What began in intolerable heat ended in cold-blooded murder.

If you’d like, perhaps you could walk down into those ravines, no more than a half mile from where we’re standing. There are no markers anywhere, like the ones at Little Big Horn, no whited stones to mark the spots where people fell. But even in their absence, ghosts linger.

White man goes to Wounded Knee (iii)

Today, right behind you, you’ll see fenced-in enclosure where a granite monument, nine feet tall, lists the names of a few of those killed here. “Chief Big Foot,” it says, and then lists “Mr. Shading Bear, Long Bull, White American, Black Coyate, Ghost Horse, Living Bear, Afraid of Bear, Young Afraid of Bear, Yellow Robe, Wounded Hand, Red Eagle,” and just a few more. Estimates vary on the number of dead buried where you’re standing, but most think 150 or so frozen bodies were dumped into the mass grave beneath the cordon of cement. No ceremony—Native or white. Just a dump.

On the other side of the stone there’s an inscription, still visible seventy years after the marker was placed where you’re standing.

This monument is erected by surviving relatives and other Ogallala and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in Memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre Dec. 29, 1890.

Col. Forsyth in command of U. S. Troops. Big Foot was a great chief to the Sioux Indians. He often said “I will stand in peace till my last day comes.” He did many good and brave deeds for the white man and the red man. Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here.

As Harry W. Paige says in Land of the Spotted Eagle, this isn’t the grammar, the syntax, or mechanics of an Oxford don. What it is, he says, is “writing that weeps.”

But what exactly did happen on the morning of December 29, 1890?

With nothing to stop it, sound travels easily on a landscape this barren. So imagine the bleat of reveille cutting through the morning cold. It’s eight o’clock, and the sun rises magnificently, albeit late, winter solstice just a few days behind. Many of the women, some of them singing, are packing for the 17-mile trip to Pine Ridge, where they anticipate meeting relatives and friends. Children play innocently around the ragged tipis and wagons, and for the first morning in many, most have eaten well.

By Indian messenger, Col. Forsyte, the commanding office, calls the men of Big Foot’s band to come to parley directly southeast of us, at the spot where the chief’s tent stands, maybe 300 yards down the hill. Spread around the entire encampment like a huge lariat, even beyond the dozens of Indian ponies just west of Big Foot’s camp and the ravine behind it, 76 unmounted sentries, equally spaced, watch the movement. On the rise beyond the ravine and set against the horizon, a long line of mounted bluecoats wait menacingly, just in front of them, some several dozen of the cavalry’s Indian scouts. From the vantage point of the soldiers, the field seems well in hand, the position geometrically arranged to prevent escape. There is no chaos, yet.

As they were commanded, something close to one hundred men—no one knows for sure—from Big Foot’s band take their places in the council circle. Behind them, those lines of bluecoats move quickly to separate the men from their women and children.

The command is given to disarm. In the face of such untoward odds, the Sioux men are wary—not only does the positioning all around them seem ominous, but to a culture created on institutional violence—a boy becomes a man by proving himself in battle—giving up one’s means to fight is giving up oneself. What’s more, they’d been promised the day before that they could keep their arms until they arrived at Pine Ridge.

Troops are dispatched to search and seize what arms they can turn up in the encampment behind them. What happens is not pleasant. The women do not take kindly to their mistreatment, the sometimes brutal ways the bluecoats plunder their selves and their possessions. When the soldiers return, they have more guns, but also axes, knives, bows and arrows, tent stakes, even beadwork awls.

It is early winter, remember, but there is more than enough emotion in the air to ignite the landscape. Fear, prejudice, a history of deception, mutually defiant cultural values, and nothing less than hate lay beneath us here like so much kindling, waiting for the pop of a flame; the whole place is combustible. What exactly happened next may be debated forever, but the trajectory of events is no more debatable than the outcome.

White man goes to Wounded knee (ii)

It would be dead wrong to assume that that belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, 1890.  Others are far more prominent:  the disappearance of the buffalo, the unceasing trek of white settlers onto traditional Lakota land, a long history of broken treaties, distrust on every side, the searing memory of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and, perhaps most of all, the inability of two peoples to understand each other.  When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic. 

Here we are.  Look around.  If you stand on this promontory in the summer, the heat can be oppressive; but on a good day you might be surrounded by a couple dozen tourists.  That’s all.  Wounded Knee doesn’t exactly border the Black Hills, and it’s not on the way to Yellowstone.  It’s not on the way to anything, really.  Right now you’re in the heart of fly-over America, many millions of Americans never coming closer to this shallow valley than, say Chicago.  Any time of year, the twisted vapor trails of jets on their way to LAX or LaGuardia float like ribbons in the genial sky. 

  

In the late fall or muddy spring or cold mid-winter—like that December day in 1890—it’s likely you’ll stand very much alone at Wounded Knee.  Cars and trucks navigate the reservation roads that cross almost directly at the point of battle, but for most of the year a visit here is unlike a visit to any other North American historic battlefield. 

Gettysburg National Military Park offers an aging but impressive Cyclorama, a remarkable circular painting, 356 feet by 26 feet, that puts visitors at the heart of the battle.  Little Big Horn’s visitor’s center sells helpful interpretive audio tapes to use as you tour several miles of battlefield from the air-conditioned comfort of your mini-van.  But if you want to know what you can about Wounded Knee, the only storyteller there, all year round, is the wind. 

Just imagine the encampment before you, and keep in mind the despair, the poverty, and the hopelessness of the dancers.  “To live was now no more than to endure/The purposeless indignity of breath,” says John G. Neihardt in The Twilight of the Sioux.  Millions of buffalo once roamed here, the staple of existence for thousands of nomadic Native people, the soul of their culture and faith.  By 1890, they were gone. In North Dakota’s horrible winter of 1996, while thousands of cattle died in the monstrous cold, it is reported that only one bison perished.  

Once the buffalo ruled here.  In all the openness all around you, the Great Plains stretching out almost forever in every direction, try to imagine what it must have been like to stand on this promontory and look over herds so large you could see the mass ripple as they shifted slightly when detecting human scent, like watching wind on water.  That’s what’s gone.  To the Sioux, the hunt was not only manhood’s proving ground, but a celebration for the family, often opened and closed with prayer.  Few 19th century wasicu could understand that the disappearance of the buffalo seemed, to many Plains Indians, almost the death of god. I don’t believe I still can, try as I might.

   

But if I stand here on the promontory at Wounded Knee and remind all that is white within me of grinding poverty, the exhaustive dissolution of a way of life, and the seeming death of god, I can, perhaps, begin to understand the frantic hope inspired by the Ghost Dance.   

White Man Goes To Wounded Knee (i)

Think of it as a tawny ocean stopped in time, a vast landscape of grass, here and there mustache-like strips of trees darkening creek beds or running along the ridges like an old headdress unfurled in wind. Today, the place where the Wounded Knee Massacre took place looks remarkably similar to what it did in early winter of 1890, a featureless, shallow valley in a seemingly unending field of prairie grass that, on a gray day, weaves itself almost inconspicuously into the cloudy sky at its reaches.

On December 28, 1890, four Hotchkiss guns—the Sioux called them the guns that fire in the morning and kill the next day—stood on a small, whitecap hill amid this arid ocean, all four aimed down into the camp of a Minneconjou chief named Sitanka, or Big Foot. There, three hundred men, women, and children were camped, hoping to reach Pine Ridge Agency the next day.

 

More than a century later, it is almost impossible to stand on that small hill and look down into the valley of Wounded Knee Creek and imagine what the place must have looked like so full of people.

 
But try. Today, a single battered billboard offers the only available outline of the story, the word “battle” crossed out and “massacre” scribbled in roughly above it. Otherwise, there is little to mark the spot. But try to imagine what this yawning, empty space must have looked like, a couple hundred Lakota just beneath the promontory where we’re standing, their worn and ripped tipis thrown up quickly, campfires floating thin plumes of smoke. These folks have been hungry for days—and tired, having just marched hundreds of miles south towards Chief Red Cloud at the Pine Ridge Agency, where they thought they’d be safe.

But there’s more, far more. Across the ravine west—maybe a half mile away on another hill sits is a sprawling encampment of several hundred troops under the command of Colonel James W. Forsyth, the largest military encampment since the Civil War. The scene is remarkable. Doubtless, that many people assembled at this remote spot on the Dakota prairie has not happened frequently, if ever, since. If it’s difficult for you to imagine, just picture a campground of nearly a thousand people in tents, then cut down all the trees.

Big Foot’s people were dancers, Ghost Dancers, strong believers in a frenetic, mystic ceremony, a hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation. If they would dance, they thought Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering. When he’d come for them, he’d bring with him the old ones (hence, "the Ghost Dance"). And the buffalo would return. Once again, the people could take up their beloved way of life. If they would dance, a cloud of dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, all of them. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, desperation comforted.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

 . . .the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. . .”

Not an appropriate metaphor—not right now anyway. It’s been too blame hot.

Two days ago I decided to take a quick trip out west. Just two hours, the Missouri River, which has been turned into a series of reservoirs by the Corps of Engineers, winds its way north, cutting right through South and North Dakota before moving west once again.

The Missouri Valley, gorgeous and humbling, is huge, broad, wide, and frequently treeless. Standing alone out there, you somehow get to know your place in time and life. I wanted to get out to some out-of-the-way spot along the river and stand on a bluff at dawn, camera in hand. I did. But that has nothing to do with this line from Psalm 37.

I’m getting older—trust me, that I know—as is our car. We’ve got a sun roof, right?—and the car is white. I’m thinking I can save the old beast some wear-and-tear if, for two and a half hours, I forgo the air-conditioning. Besides, all around me are myriad overweight and balding Harley lovers on their way to Sturgis for the annual million motorcycle march. What kind of man am I if I sit like a sissy in air-conditioned comfort? It’s a guy thing.

So I turned the air-conditioner off. I did.

And I almost died.

Just a few weeks ago on the plains of South Dakota, the temperature reached 115. It wasn’t that hot while I was there, but 105 is hardly mellow. The whole world looked bleached and starved. There will be no corn crop this year out there, but that’s not unusual in central South Dakota. Fields are yellowed prematurely and sickly thin because weeks and weeks of heat often rode the back of a raspish south wind that will wither almost any living thing.

I had visions of taking photographs, but during the middle of the day it takes a pretty heavy polarizing filter to get anything but endless dry, shiny tawny-ness on the Plains. Out there, earth and sky meet, really—the world seems a dusty tarn in flat-out unremitting heat. On the Great Plains, there ain’t no trees, and thus no place to hide.

Heat wears you out. All along the way, my windows open, I marveled that road construction people could actually stand in that heat during the day—worse, work in it, pouring blacktop, of all things.

But I know what David means, even if, this morning, in the cool of my basement, I’m thankful to be out of the noonday sun he seems to admire.

The shoulders of the Missouri River are huge and husky, just a few rippling savannahs running memorably up their ample sides. When the noonday sun shines openly down upon its waters and those gargantuan bluffs, there are few dark corners and almost no hiding from that ball of fire.

King David’s take on that phenomenon is joy, however, because in bright sun there are no secrets and no prejudices. Righteousness shines, bare nakedly, in the wash of noonday. Everybody sees what they haven’t. They’ll all know because there it is.

There are times in everyone’s life when it’s a great thing to be out of the shadows, to be baldly open for all the world to see. That’s the promise, startling as it seems. No more repression, no more fear, no more enforced silence. God’s love creates for all of our humanness one grand out-of-the-closet noonday sun.

An intro to an often-asked question

I was born and reared on the west coast of Lake Michigan, a healthy day's travel from the Great Plains. For the last forty years or so, I've lived on the emerald edge of those plains on land that begins to resemble the barren beauty of what's out there where, all too regularly, less than twenty inches of rainfall blesses the far more arid land. 

Yesterday, I was even closer to line, out following the Missouri River where it makes a gradual turn north and begins to cut the state of South Dakota in half. For reasons that are far beyond me, I've come to love its ruggedness, its immense beauty, probably because its stories carry so much of the history of the nation, of the continent. Up on a Nebraska hill not all that far from here, Lewis and Clark found the 40-foot skeleton of some kind of prehistoric sea monster. Imagine that. Imagine this: must have shocked them silly.

People often ask, even today, where did all of that come from, all that interest, all that energy. There is no easy answer--the photographs of Dorothea Lange maybe, who has created images as powerful as Steinbeck's novels. Some fascination with Native populations, about whom so many of us know so very little. Part of it too is the fact that hoards of colonials, like my own ancestors, amassed into and over the plains actually believing they could attain a kind of freedom they'd never see in County Cork or Friesland or Alsace-Lorraine, nor, for that matter, in upstate New York or Ohio or even eastern Iowa. Many of those are long gone. Today, outside my window, a section of land may well be inhabited by three or four farm places, only one of which actually runs an agricultural operation. 

I fell in love with the Great Plains in great part because of they are not any more, a playground of enthusiasm, of energy, of wins and losses, of life's great dramas, no less rich with humanity than any vastly more populace place on the land.

Native America? That deep and sustained interest was created by a book titled, easily enough, The Great Plains, by Ian Frazier, who wrote back then for the New York Times. By the end of that wonderful book, Frazier turns into the old German Reformed preacher his grandfather was when he claims that what he'd discovered in random travels between Texas and North Dakota was that the place has always been a playground. 

It's a questionable thesis, especially if you're Native and the 19th century is cited, but I liked the assertion, even though I didn't believe it. Even Custer--even at Little Big Horn, Frazier says--was having fun. Something of a questionable assertion, however, but not all wrong. Many of the neighborhood's first settlers were "pups," boys of the English gentry shipped over to this empty land just after the Civil War to learn about something called work, but to have fun doing it. 

Imagine fox hunting through Sioux County prairies if there was no one around. The first electrical wire in LeMars, Iowa, was the one strung from the dorm-type dwelling where the "pups" stayed, to the tavern downtown in the village, a mile away.

What really drew my attention was something called "the Messiah craze," a ritual Native people called "the Ghost Dance," a dream vision of a Piute named Wovoka, who, as you might expect, saw a vision and let every other Native within hearing distance know what he'd discovered. Ian Frazier calls it, really, the first really American religion. Whether or not it's true is up for grabs. What we know is that, as a religion, it had many thousands of adherents. 

The Ghost Dance. I could take you today to a place less than two hours away with the Yanktons held their very own, not all that far away from a Dutch settlement of orthodox Calvinists in a place where my own great-grandparents thought they could live comfortably off the land. 

More than ten years ago, I thought I'd write a novel that would include at least something of the Wounded Knee Massacre. I'd never been out there, far west in South Dakota, and I knew I needed to be. I went by myself, in one day, if you can believe it--out and back. I was there alone. It was cold and slightly rainy. The Wounded Knee battle ground is not on the interstate. You have to want to go there. People don't just stumble on it.

But I went, and what came from that experience--a solo visit to the site of unimaginable death--eventually became a long essay published in a magazine that no long exists, a journal called Books and Culture.

I thought I'd run it here on my blog for some time. It's certainly something I would consider not only as accomplished as anything I've ever written, but also as formative. That little trip sharpened my most pointed interests. 

On Monday, I'll begin with "A White Man Goes to Wounded Knee."

All things must, yeah, pass. . .

[The presentations here referred to were given in 2007, during the 150th anniversary of the Christian Reformed Church. That makes this little meditation 16 years old and me 59, a long, long time ago. It seems I was already feeling my age. . .]

Yesterday, I was delivered of (something about it feels almost passive) a speech I've now given three weekends in a row--twice here in Iowa, and once in Michigan. That essay--part research paper, part ethnographic study, part devotional--took great chunks out of two years of my life. For a long time, I watched tea leaves, listened to national news, read op-eds, and studied the sociology of religion, in order to accomplish a task I was, well, assigned: to create a crystal ball to determine, as well as you can, whether or not the denomination to which I belong, the Christian Reformed Church, has another 50 years.

The answer to that question? I don't know.

But the essay that came out of all that study and time--originally just about 60 pages long--and the presentation--which included videos from visits with people from a variety of churches--is now history. There will be one more publication thereof, but otherwise all of that work will now exist only in the back forty of a single microchip buried somewhere in my computer. Really, a chapter of my life is over.

I don't know that I'd call it a chapter, really, but it was a goodly chunk of time. The project was a challenge, an exercise that was good for me. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed presenting it. I enjoyed people's steady, open eyes, yesterday, as they listened. I believe it went over well.

For the last couple weeks, our old barn has been a kind of canvas for the incredible work of more than a few noiseless, patient spiders. Were I an expert, a real-live arachnologist, I'd know why now, this time of year, a certain species of spider chooses to festoon the corners of our barn with their webs. I don't. All I know is, those spiders suddenly create elaborate webs right about now.

One day last week, a spectacularly-designed monster web was simply gone, blown away, I think, by winds that rush around the prairie just about daily in September. It had been an incredible piece of work; but when I went out there to get my bicycle, it was gone. Felt sorry for the ugly little fella who'd spent himself beautifully, who did all that work.

That night, when I got back home after teaching, it was there again, miraculously. He'd built it again in an afternoon, spun it out of his silky entrails and was crouched there in the middle, legs drawn up in a fetal position, as if he were just plain pooped. Really, of course, he was waiting for some woebegone bug. A web, no matter how beautiful, is a little more than a highly elaborate murder plot. Poor guy's got to eat.

It was gone. Several hours later, it was back. He'd spun that masterpiece out of nothing in no time flat.

Yesterday, the wind. Yesterday, once again his workmanship was gone. Maybe this time get smart and seek out some less public triangle.

It's humbling to have to admit it, but I probably feel sorry for him because I feel sorry for myself--so much work so quickly gone.

But making webs what he does--or she; and I imagine in that little spider mind of his, he's not subject to the vagaries of hubris. He's not thinking that something important he did--or she--is now gone. He's not thinking a life's work has to be eternal.

He's just weaving what he weaves, doing what he's does. Making breathtaking webs is what sets his mind to. Somewhere, right now, he's is probably plotting another piece of silky architecture, an elaborate trap for just another supper.

His persistence is as remarkable as his accomplishments, and its own kind of meditation.

___________________ 

By the by, should you be at all interested in the essay/speech referred to in this solemn essay, you can find it here. Beware! It's a long, long read, and, 16 years later, it's dated.

Collateral Damage

Karen Edelman Williams had never been here before, never seen unending fields of corn and soybeans amid the tawny prairie grass, never seen anything like the yawning openness all around. So when, sometime later, she wrote a letter to those people she’d met on a visit out here, she told them she’d never forget the place. “I will never forget the kindness of the people we met there,” she told them, “or the beauty of your Nebraska skies.”

In a roundabout way, what brought her here was those Nebraska skies. She was only six months old when her father became a casualty of World War II way out in the middle of America, thousands of miles from Normandy or the Philippines. Out here, her father trained for the bombing runs that would end wars in both theaters. Her father, and sixteen others with him, fell to their deaths from those same Nebraska skies.

So the only way Karen Edelman Williams knew her father was by way of her mother, who, she says, never really got past her husband’s shocking death. There wasn’t much to say because she and her husband had been together for such short a time that when, years later, Mrs. Williams thought about it, she told her daughter their relationship seemed almost like a long date. 

When skies clear over the plains, barely a day goes by without a jet trail painting a cloudy swath through bright azure; but if you stand out there for a week you’ll not see what people saw day after day during World War II, skies full of B-24s, then B-29s, in perfect formation, as if Berlin was just beyond the Missouri River.

The state of Nebraska hosted eleven Army air fields during the war, requiring industry that’s almost impossible to imagine in farm country today. Thousands of workers poured concrete and built barracks and command posts, as well as a hospital of some 300 beds. Today, very little of that remains. Today, the only engines grunting on the land power tandem-wheel tractors pulling 18-bottom plows. 

In 2003, Karen Edelman Williams took her mother along when she went out west on the 60th anniversary of her father’s death. Local men and women helped the family through what had always seemed mystery, the government's unwillingness to say much about what had happened. Eventually, those B-29s out of rural Nebraska became part of the squadron that delivered the atom bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But locals knew what happened, because when planes crashed into farmland, the crews died on ground those farmers worked. You can’t hide a plane crash in all that open sky and land. Descendants of those farmers showed Lt. Williams’ family where the planes had crashed, even, mercifully, described the seeming peace of the dead crew.

Four B-24s were flying in tight formation on October 23, 1943, late afternoon, when one of them moved out and another, as required, filled in. Something happened, mid-air—two of them touched, collided. They were 20,000 feet up. 

Lt. James Williams was four years older than his wife. He’d been in night school, wanting to be a lawyer. When he died in these open fields, Karen’s mother was just 19—a new wife, a young mom, and an instant widow. 

She says her mother always blamed herself for her husband’s death. The doctors told her taking a train all the way out to Nebraska was not good for a young mom—she’d have to wait six weeks. Her husband had begged her to come earlier, but she’d waited, listened to the doctor.

He was killed when she was on the train to Nebraska.

Sixty million people died in World War II, including 419 thousand Americans, 26 of whom died, almost secretly, on open land beneath beautiful Great Plains skies.

They’ve not been forgotten. There’s a road marker out there in Fillmore County, three of them, one for each crash. 

And the families remember. Karen Edelman Williams, who grew up without a father, says, “My mother never really recovered. Train whistles made her cry.”

They’re all heroes, every one of them.

L and C at Calumet Bluff

In terms of sheer grandiosity, nothing like it had ever lit up the banks of the Missouri River, St. Louis to the great falls. Today, you might guess the stage for the entire circus to be buried somewhere beneath the sparkling waters of the lake named after Meriweather Lewis and William Clark, just west of Yankton. About that, you would be wrong.

When the long-anticipated first meeting of the Corps with a sizeable band of Native Americans--the Yanktons--finally materialized, it was quite a show, or so some say. Seventy Yanktons dressed to the nines in their own, finest go-to meetin' attire led the parade, singing and dancing in a processional to meet the Corps, who were--each of them -- decked out and spit-shined in brass-buttoned parade uniforms. A little fireworks, and it could have been one heckuva cross-cultural Fourth of July.

But where, you ask?--where did this first great confab take place? Beneath a towering oak people say, a monster that could well still stand today somewhere in the trees at the foot of Calumet Bluff. And Calumet Bluff, you ask--"where is that again?" Just hunt for the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, way up high above Gavins Point Dam. You're there.

Sort of. The great to-do of August 30, 1804, was a two-day affair that went on beneath an oak tree, not high up on a bluff but somewhere far down below, and some distance from the river's edge. 

By the time the Yanktons came across, Meriweather Lewis wasn't scared. The day before, he and Clark had sent two men over to the other side--Pierre Dorian, a trapper who'd spent years with the Yanktons, and Nathaniel Pryor, who hadn't. When they'd returned, they claimed the extravagance of their greeting seemed almost goofy. The Yanktons wanted to tote Pryer into camp on a buffalo robe, like a superstar. He'd politely declined the offer. 

That afternoon Mr. Clark had been writing and rehearsing a speech he was about to give for the very first time, something to explain why these strange, uniformed white men were here, to tell them of their new Great Father, who wanted to trade with them, and to ask them to make peace with their neighbors so that all those rifle-toting uniforms could be their friends too. 

Introduce yourselves as children of the Great Father in Washington, Jefferson had told them, urge them to make peace in the land, and shore up some business ties. That was the whole program. Then show off a little. Leave them some SWAG--some mirrors and jack knives and maybe a snort or two of whiskey. 

But Mr. Clark had never, ever spoken to a gathering of Indigenous, never tried to communicate where no English was spoken, explain a program to a frontier people who might be able to say the word "Nantucket," but had no way of imagining the place. How do you write a speech without knowing how to speak to a hundred souls only by relying on the translation of an old trapper like Pierre Dorian? Stem to stern, the Lewis and Clark Expedition was one great action movie, but I can't help thinking the day Lewis spent preparing his first speech had to be among the most harrowing. There he sat, trying to make his words say something translatable, with no way to be sure all of it got to where it needed to be understood. 

How could he tell them the Great Father wants them to come to Washington for a visit? How does he make that clear? What's Washington to them?

The next day, those seventy warriors and all those Yanktons seemed most appreciative. They stood and sat politely, broad smiles plastered across their faces as if they weren't missing a beat, when, just quite possibly, nothing at all got through. 

Just west of Yankton, Lewis and Clark, deep in a woods of oak and pine--attempted, for the very first time, to pass along an agenda from the President of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson, and get those feather-bedecked partiers to sign on to the dotted line. And they were Sioux, too, the greatly-feared Sioux! His job was to make them a deal that would promise them riches, to make 'em an offer they couldn't refuse.

It's almost November right now. I can't help thinking that what happened there at Calumet Bluff was the first American political rally west of the Mississippi. No caps or t-shirts maybe, no signs and posters, but really, pretty much the same song-and-dance. 

Tonight at the DAHM (Dutch American Heritage Museum)

 

If you're anywhere near Orange City tonight (6:30), stop by the museum for Sara's fascinating and lively presentation on ye olde Sioux County Poor Farm. "Nights at the Museum" has had another great year, lots of community interest. "Over the Hill" is the final program of the 2023 season.

What I was after on Saturday morning

Misty, smokey too--a bit. When the sun rose, it wasn't the most radiant of dawns, but the skies seemed clear and out here where we live no seasonal weather rivals early fall for gifts of grace. All I wanted to do was gather a few pictures of the Missouri River right from its banks. 

Try this, a bit farther back. Not half-bad really, but pulling a memorable sunrise from that mist requires more ability than the man snapping the shutter packs with him, early morning.

I've been to the Mulberry Bend overlook tons of times, but I keep going back because the view of the river is so spectacularly wide and even varied that it always takes my breath away. The trees on the way up the path are still outfitted in their summer attire, so the view straight north and northeast--another whole gallery--is simply inaccessible. Still, the views from Mulberry Point are plain gorgeous. I don't know that I've ever been able to get it--or even a chunk of it--in a lens. It's just too big, too wide, too spacious. 

The Corps of Engineers are keeping the water levels low right now, so the islands in the middle are a reminder of what Lewis and Clark had to navigate--and Mulberry Point is a great place to capture their naked emergences.

Bow Creek Recreational Area is at the end of almost eternal gravel roads, each of them smaller and smaller and rougher, more pockmarked, so that just getting there is intimidating. I couldn't help thinking I'd made a wrong turn, but no, I didn't. Bow Creek offers some bountiful looks at the river I'd come to see.

So you're saying that this can't be the Missouri. It's way, way too small. Well, it is, but what you're looking at is three shorebirds (not really) who've gathered at the edge of an island. Yes, there are islands in the swath of river that runs south and east from the dam at Pickstown, and this is one of them.  

But I didn't come for an island. Here's what I'd hoped to get--some real pics of the big river itself.

And then this. This shot may not leave you breathless, but it's the kind of picture I came to get, an image that somehow creates a portrait most like the river the Corps of Discovery came to know so intimately. 

Mulberry Point takes your breath away, but this is the photograph that accompanies any content that brings to life--or tries to bring to life--at least something of the experience of the Corps, right here, in 1804, making their tedious way up river. Somewhere near here, they discovered George Shannon sitting on a sandbar waiting for some lonesome trapper coming down river with a bundle of furs, looking to get paid for all his hard work, someone who'd give him a ride to St. Louis. He'd been lost for sixteen days right about here.

He thought the whole enterprise had simply gone on without him. He just figured they kept on going when he didn't show up. His hunger was fierce, and he was tired of being lonely. George Shannon was just a kid, barely 18 years old. 

I don't know if that happened right here at Bow Creek. I don't know that anyone knows exactly where all of that happened. But this shot, into the smoky river's bend, is big and broad enough to hold whatever imaginations I can create. 

See where the land juts into the water up ahead. Poor kid might have been sitting right there when the Corps came around a bend you can't quite see. Could have. Honestly, could have.

Pardon me if I say that last one is a great picture. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Dawn (Psalm 37)

“He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn,. . .”

 We were standing atop a miniature mountain, looking out over the Big Sioux River Valley from a bluff that’s not more than ten miles from the junction where the river beneath us empties into the Missouri, at Sioux City, Iowa. There was no one else there.

Behind us, darkened prairie grasses ran up to the edge of the hill and a horizon that, right then, couldn’t have been more vivid. Through the lens of my camera, the earth was black to the east, the sky so triumphantly showy that it was hard to look clearly into the face of what was coming.

When I swung back west, I saw what we’d come to shoot, a yawning valley whose scattered farm places—shadowy, colorless clumps of trees and buildings—created the only visual difference between what this landscape looked like that morning, and how it might have appeared 200 years ago, when Lewis and Clark was in the neighborhood. From where I stand, I could almost see them, I swear.

We were up on a swell on the northernmost reaches of the Loess Hills, looking over an endless russet landscape of open fields and only occasional trees in the golden breath of the breaking dawn.

On the broad land before us there was not a door in sight; the open world was all window. Here and there on the echelons of gravel and pavement laid out every mile beneath us, an occasional truck moved toward the city, its funneling headlights out front like the long snout of hound. Otherwise, we were alone, waiting for the dawn.

Painted up against the flat-line clouds, sunrise was coming, not so much in some luminous yellows, but in a rich caramel, a long swath of butterscotch that ran for miles across the eastern horizon, at its heart a brilliant smudge of gold.

But nothing ever stays the same; blink and the hues have shifted. Turn away for ten seconds, and a new painting stretches across an endless sky. A photograph doesn’t catch the dawn any more than a story captures life; a photograph is a glimpse, one fleeting fraction of a second, one frame of a film that re-runs every morning, but has never, ever been the same.

Still, the sun was not quite up. The broad plain that filled half the frame was already beginning to glow. Just above it, the ridge of clouds at the western horizon had reddened in sunlight that hadn’t yet fallen below. We were caught in a fleeting moment that is neither night nor day, but something almost richer than both—a dim-lit zone that can be experienced only for a few seconds each glowing morning. On those fields across the river west, silver barn roofs began to shine as the curtain of dawn opened, not as sunlight rose, but as it fell over the land.

And then, suddenly, in a magician’s flick of a wand, all around us the prairie grass was sheathed in bronze, as if taken from the fire. Down at our feet, the world turned to Oz, the big bluestem, golden rod, and blazing stars burnished as if sacred. We forgot the sprawling open miles west because the show right there beneath our feet made us feel, honestly, that we were standing on holy ground.

I’d like to think that’s the light that’s promised in this line of David’s poem—that shimmering gold that spreads like bronze gossamer over the land at the moment the sun rises. The word is shine, but reality is glow. Dawn’s early light is heavenly alchemy. Think of it—everything we do, shining with the radiant gold-blessed touch of dawn.

That’s Easter, no matter what the weather. That’s the promise.

For Suicide Prevention Month, 2023

School was less than a block away when I was a kid, so I walked, every day, sometimes out the front door, sometimes out the back. I went home every noon for lunch.

That’s when I saw what I did. I was walking back to school after lunch when two men lugged a body out of John’s house. On a stretcher–that’s what I remember, the body covered with a sheet. Completely. I was maybe a fourth or fifth grade kid, something like that, a few summers away from what the church used to call “the age of discretion.”

An old couple lived there, just a man and his wife, right across the alley. I don’t remember him as jovial or even all that friendly. We knew the old folks in the neighborhood who could–which is to say couldn’t–be teased. Step anywhere close to Mrs. Lensink’s garden, and she’d be out that back door and all over you. John and his wife were only rarely visible.

John worked for the city, for a man–a relative, my mom used to say–named “Hard.” That’s all I knew. I was a kid.

But that afternoon I knew either John or his wife was dead. The body was covered on that stretcher.

My parents didn’t try to keep me from the truth. They talked about it that night at supper, in a hushed distress that made me fearful because I wasn’t accustomed to seeing my parents so diminished. Neighbor John had hung himself in the basement of his house, the house right across the alley.

Suicide.

I don’t think I’d ever heard the word suicide in a context in which the victim was someone I knew, but his being lugged out of the back door of the house and calmly carried into an ambulance, no whirling lights, has stayed with me for sixty years. That picture came with another, one I never witnessed but still see: an old man hanging from a ceiling rafter of the house just across the alley. On summer Saturdays John mowed his lawn right there on the other side of our white picket fence. I barely remember him, his personality, his character; but I’ll always see him down there where his life ended, even though the image is only imagined.

There are more such stories after all these years. A man, once a friend, but a guy I hadn’t seen for years, someone who will always be a smart kid with a sharp sense of humor, good-looking, Beatle haircut. He hung himself in his garage.

Years ago, I wrote a story about a young woman flirting with taking her own life. Just to get there in my imagination was really tough because it was very difficult to attain the depth of despair she would have had to reach to consider leaving life behind. I don’t remember the story or the title, and I’m sure I never finished it. But just trying to go there in my imagination darkened my soul in a way that I’ve not forgotten.

A while ago chairs and desks and tables in the recreation center at the college were strewn with cards like the one up there at the top of the page, a sweet little image/message designed to speak kindly to the students just returned to school. I picked one up.

“We keep going and we go together,” that card says on its backside, and more. “Above all else, we choose to stay. We choose to fight the darkness and the sadness, to fight the questions and the lies and the myth of all that’s missing.” Life is worth living is the simple sermon on that simple card that announces World Suicide Prevention Day.

In 2021, more than 48,000 Americans died by their own hands last year; seven of ten of them were middle-aged white males. Attempts? 1.4 million. Guns? 55%.

In my life, there’s no story I’m not telling you. I didn’t lose a brother, a daughter, a relative, a really close friend, a mom or a dad. In any very close sense, I’m not a victim of suicide. But in the close-knit world around me, two men I didn’t know and never met just quit on life in the last month or so. They weren’t friends, in all likelihood didn’t know each other; but they both took their own life. For once, the little country church not so far from where we live overflowed with people, one woman told me–it was just full of mourners.

Most personally, my son-in-law only recently lost a man he considered among his best friends, a confidante. 

Me? I won’t forget the time two men carried John’s covered body out the back door of the house across the alley. It’s not something I choose to remember. I just do.

"We’ll see you tomorrow."

Maybe

There's no way to eye the future with any accuracy, even though we all savor our own hopes and dreams. Both parties' candidates could fall over dead at any time; I'm not being flippant, a dramatic and sudden death or two has never been more possible. Biden looks more and more deathly every day. Lots of folks--responsible people, many of them Democrats--are convinced that he should not run again. Me too. I can't help but think he'd go out as one of the great winners of the age because he steered us through the darkness post-Trump, reversed economic trending, created infrastructure jobs that put the nation to work, and then, when it became clear that age was a factor in his ability to govern, he left. He'd be a star. 

Besides, voracious Trump lapdogs like Matt Gaetz may well take him down in their own vainglorious attempt at a now-it's-our-turn impeachment. They'll dangle Hunter before cameras on all the right-wing media until there is no Hunter to dangle; and then they'll bring him back post-mortem. "You thought Trump was a crook?--everybody does it, brother--everybody, even your liberal pansies!"

But let's just say that, come November 2024, we're stuck with the same choices, and let's say that no third-party candidate scores enough votes to really affect the outcome of the tired old race--Trump vs. Biden. What's going to be the outcome?

I hope this is more than hopeful thinking, but I'm putting my money on the older of the old guys and here's why.

You may remember a phenomenon back in 2016--no one, including pollsters, ever dreamed that a bad boy from NYC, a known adulterer who claimed to love grabbing women's privates, a gambling magnate who said he didn't like vets like McCain, men who got themselves captured, a big mouth who violated every last code ever created for American Presidents, that man could win in November. When he did, people said that shocking victory, unforeseen by almost any polling agency, was created by the deceit of men and women who swore they'd never vote for the guy, then did.

Trump was so degraded as a candidate that tons of people who ended up voting for him, said they simply wouldn't and then did. They were afraid of being dragged into the gutter by their own preferences, so they lied to pollsters. Lots and lots of people who voted for the Orange Man wouldn't admit to it before their votes were cast. But they did. 

Here's my prediction. Right now, every Presidential poll has the two old men neck and neck, as impossible as that may seem. Trump may well end up in jail--don't figure on it! --from any of, what? 90-some indictments. He's an unlikely winner, although he's pulled victory from the eye teeth of defeat before. 

This time around, I'm thinking the pollsters are being lied to in a fashion that works the opposite direction. Amid all the indictments, the sympathy generated for the man who will undoubtedly go down in history as the most forked tongue President of all time, garnered a lot of bucks and regard. No longer are people ashamed to register their sympathy for a man who registered his weight at 215 pounds. I think they'll tell anyone who asks that they're Trump people. It's cultish, and cults are fun.

HOWEVER, when in November, push comes to shove, literally millions of his minions will sit there in the booth and tell themselves they're frickin' sick of it, all the horror and hoopla the man puts out every last day of life, all the deceit that simply part of the package, all the ballyhoo, which is fun to watch--most of us are addicted--but is immensely and horridly tiring. 

What I'm saying makes a claim that the American public has more moral character than many others believe. When push comes to shove and they're standing there in the voting booth, I'm saying lots of people who claim to be MAGAs will check the box across the ledger from the heavyweight candidate. 

I'm saying, this time around, the lie will reverse course because those who are charmed by his naughty-boy status will suffer an attack of morality and send the Prince of Orange on his way.

You know, maybe.  Hope springs eternal.

Of tax collectors and pagans

Romey's Place, a novel, is half memoir, a hybrid really, that doesn't try to pass itself off as memoir, in large part because in the writer's mind--which is to say, mine--it never was meant as a memoir, even though some scenes are drawn from my own life.

Several major scenes are entirely made up, for example, a scene that happens in church, when the preacher and an elder meet with the boys after it had been discovered they were not only smoking cigarettes but stealing them from a downtown grocer. What's true is that we stole cigarettes (Kent was the favorite--mild stuff). In one of the most significant moments in my childhood--of my life, really--was the moment Mom and Dad confronted me one night in my bedroom. It wasn't late, but I pretended to be asleep. They woke me. My mother cried throughout a long and painful interrogation. I was 11 or 12 years old.

In my boyhood, I couldn't help but believe the church was real authority. I honestly didn't fear the law. I don't know that my parents would ever have turned me in to the town constable. To my child's mind, the real authority--the law--was the awesome power the church wielded. As a kid, I knew that the institution of society I had to fear was the church.

No reader I know has ever suggested that scene is fantasy, that nothing like that would ever have happened--boys stealing cigarettes having to appear before a consistory. No one has ever questioned its veracity because most readers whose age is my own remember a church that was the law in the community. When I was a kid, I never feared cops like I did the church.

The basis for that fear was embedded in the Heidelburg Catechism, which went out of its way to make clear that "the true church" practiced church discipline, not simply because some theologian sang the praises of a disciplining church, but because the Christ himself instituted it in passages like Matthew 18, where Jesus tells the disciples how to deal with people who depart:

If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

For 75 years of my life, that final line--"treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector" meant to run that person the heck out of the congregation of the righteous. If all else fails to redeem the offender, the unrepentant sinner, then run him or her out of the community.

The church's great authority back then was in its ability to determine who would be and who wouldn't be in the fellowship. And those sinners who didn't seek peace, Jesus said, should be handled like "a pagan or a tax collector," which is to say stay the heck away from him or her.

But Sunday morning's sermon made perfectly clear that the old way of understanding Matthew 15 was bogus because, as we know, Jesus himself never practiced what he supposedly preached (with the exception of flipping gambling tables in the temple). Jesus hung around with deplorables, chose to love them vastly more than the Pharisees, the ruling religious elites, the seminary profs of his day, the officers of the classis, the local dominie.

I don't remember ever hearing an interpretation of a biblical passage so opposite to what I'd always assumed was there. If I am to believe that I have to believe the gospel writer's intent was to force us to interpret the line in a way that is the exact opposite of what it says--don't treat the unrepentant sinner as a pariah; instead, treat him as a true child of God.

You want proof? Who wrote the book?--Matthew, of course, who was a hated tax collector himself when Christ called him to be a disciple. What Matthew himself never saw once he became part of the Jesus movement was Jesus lambasting a tax collector. For Christ's sake, Matthew was one.

Never in my life has a single, simple interpretation so reshaped what I would consider a traditional reading of the biblical text as what I heard on Sunday morning. Jesus never meant to condone a species of church discipline that would keep people out of the circle of saving faith; there's just too much proof of the opposite, proof drawn directly from the life and ministry of Jesus himself.

Amazing. Enlightening. Helpful--all of those. 

The church I remember as a boy was right downtown. That church--the one in the photo--is gone now, has been for years and years--physically, that is, but spiritually too. We're different, much different.