Provenance i

Twice, Sunday, we sang "In Christ Alone." Morning worship at our own church. Evening service, with a pile of other churches at a Reformation Day special. Twice "In Christ Alone," and both times, for me, a long and blessed story emerges from that contemporary hymn. 

Seems amazing that "In Christ Alone" is only 20+ years old. Stuart Townend wrote the lyrics, Keith Getty the music, their very first collaboration, and it became a world-wide hit. Those with more musical knowledge than I have claim that "In Christ Alone" has a distinctively Irish folk tune feel, which it surely might, given that Townend and Getty call Ireland home.

In some circles at least, its immense popularity was helped along by a rip-roaring doctrinal fight, created when the PCUSA, the quintessential "mainline" denomination in North America, decided against giving it a place in their hymnal. They couldn't handle one particular line: "Till on that cross as Jesus died/the wrath of God was satisfied." The Presbyterians hated even a whiff of the idea that God almighty was responsible in any way for his son's own death, so they tried alterations. Townend wouldn't buy them--it's got to be what he wrote. 

The last thing I'd care to do is mix it up in a theological brawl--I'll stay out of that ring. Besides, that's not the story that rises from in my soul whenever I get anywhere near that music. That's a story that begins with a telephone call.

"Jake Mulder, Emo," the voice said--period. Masculine, young but not a kid, forceful, so sure of himself that it never dawned on him the man he was calling might not know exactly what an emo was. I withheld the giggle, but I'm sure I smiled. What I knew in an instant was that I'd have to solve the mystery of "emo" through whatever content was a'comin'.

They were having a retreat, Jake said, the young people of the church (Emo was a town with a Christian Reformed Church), and they were wondering whether I'd be interested in coming up (okay, it's in Canada) and be their speaker. 

I'm guessing I'd been teaching at Dordt College for two years, hadn't yet entertained requests to speak anywhere that I remember. Going to this place--this "Emo"--sounded like a trip--especially if the rest of the kids were anything like Jake Mulder. He sold me. I don't think he doubted for a moment that I'd say yes. Who would, after all? It's Emo we're talking about here. 

It took another call or two to get the arrangements down. Emo was pretty much straight north in northern Ontario, he told me, even though the town itself is pretty much right on the river that divides the States from Canada, which would seem to me to be "southern" Ontario--I mean, you can't go too much farther south. He had the trip all determined for me-- part of it in a little single-engine lightweight that landed on a grassy field. 

Sometime along the line I asked about the crowd. It would include kids from Thunder Bay to Winnepeg, a bunch, he told me. I told myself to find out where Thunder Bay was. High school age? "Sure," he said, as if they studiously avoided discrimination, "and older too." In Canada, as in the Netherlands back then, a young people's society included 20-somethings. You left the fold only when you got yourself a spouse. 

"We got a place for you right down the road from town," he told me, "the Veldhuisens." I had no idea what I was in for. One of the Veldhuisen girls had taken a class with me. She's the one who said they ought to get the Dordt guy to come to Emo. 

All I knew was I'd be staying at the Veldhuisens somewhere just down the road from a place called Emo, a very real place, in Canada, somewhere around another town called International Falls, wherever that was.

I'm quite sure they wanted me to read stories. If they'd wanted me to preach, hard as it would have been to turn down Jake Mulder, I'd have begged off--I've never been a preacher. 

Pence is out

Anyone who takes prayer seriously will take former VP Mike Pence's description of himself seriously. Last weekend he shocked everyone by officially dropping out of contention--I'm not sure he was ever in--to become the Republican nominee for President, did so "after much prayer and deliberation," he said. No one doubts that. It's not hard to imagine Pence on his knees beseeching the Lord for His good word on what must have been, for the former VP, a difficult decision.

His numbers were failing, and his coffers were empty. He was finished before he was finished.

I feel sorry for Trump's silver-haired, faithful sidekick.

Somewhat. 

He's not a victim. Given his ample religiosity, he must have known that Donald Trump's choosing him as VP was pure politics, an attempt by the Orange Man to harvest the Christian sheaves in the electorate, the immense evangelical base who had ample misgivings about a thrice-married bully who bragged about his sexual accomplishments. With Saint Mike Pence smiling at his side, Trump isolated his own piggishness enough to appear normally moral, which he, of course, never was. Pence pitched in, bringing in the pious the President needed. Remember those early days when scores of evangelicals loved to call Donald J. Trump a "baby believer"? 

From day one Mike Pence got used; but then Pence used Trump too. He had to have smelled the rat, but he took the job because he knew--or thought he knew--that any aspirations he ever had for the Presidency would be enhanced by his being VP, whether Trump won the 2016 election or didn't (in fact, preferably that he didn't).

But he did, Pence at his side, nodding and grinning like a stooge. You can't help wonder what Mike Pence said to the Lord after ascending to office. I'm sure he asked for God's blessing on the Trump administration, but you can't help feeling that Pence's penchant for prayer had to be altered. Did he pray to keep Muslims out of the country, to give significant revenues to the rich, money they didn't need? Did he pray for the Mexicans to pay for the wall?  

I'm guessing he prayed for the Trump. He'd have to, really--he was and is a believer. But you can't help wondering if he didn't ask the Lord, please, please to change the bully and his belligerence, to heal that forked tongue. What Pence asked about Trump is between the former VP and the Lord, but I'd love a transcript.

On January 6th everything changed. Pence knew very well what his boss wanted him to do, and, au contraire, what the boss's chorus wanted. He'd been coached. If he wanted to stay in office, he needed to act, to toss out the tally. After prayer, I'm sure, he did the right thing and chose the constitution over the great deceiver. He said nothing, thereby making a moral determination that preserved the rule of law but ended his Presidential aspirations, made him public enemy #1 for the 30 million cultic Trumpettes. When he chose to do nothing, his political aspirations went dead in the water--if they hadn't been before. 

He did nothing and therefore did everything. He chose the constitutionally-mandated dumb show job and not the slates of false electors. He did the right thing, undoing the wrong thing he'd done four years earlier in accepting the VP job in the first place, a job he was given because he was such an ardent public pray-er, a saint the Great Sinner needed to mount the support of millions of other pray-without-ceasing Trumpettes.

Life holds lots of opportunities to use this old maxim, but I haven't employed it for a long time, so I'll take it out of the attic because it fits. Goes like this: "He who sups with the Devil had best use a long spoon."

When a man who goes to his knees as often as Pence seems to say he does, the day he accepted Trump's offer to be his VP is the day he signed away his fate, not to the Lord but to the darkness. 

I do feel sorry for him. He's come to the end of the road politically. You would have had to be blind not to see that coming. More Republicans hate him than like him.

But Mike Pence was never a victim. Never was, and never will be. 

Sunday Morning Meds --from Psalm 37

“A little while, and the wicked will be no more;

though you look for them, they will not be found.”

 

More than thirty years have passed since a man known as the BTK Killer (“bind, torture, kill”) was sentenced to 175 years in prison. Dennis Rader, who for years had eluded police in Wichita, Kansas, even as he taunted them through a string of brutal murders, could not, legally, have received a tougher sentence.

 

It is sometimes as difficult to take to heart some of the sentiment of the Psalms as it is tough to stomach wholesale Old Testament blood-letting. Honestly, I have to think long and hard today to come up with people I’d associate—or certainly brand—with the word “wicked." 

 

Certainly, Dennis Rader is one, a serial murderer who carried out demonic crimes over a thirty-year period, while playing an evil game of cat and mouse with police. Married, with two children, Dennis Rader was a city official who enforced zoning and neighborhood codes and an active member of a local church, where he had been elected the congregation’s president.

 

He’d served his country in the Air Force, did time in Vietnam. Dennis Rader was a Jekyll/Hyde, someone occasionally characterized as so nondescript that his being BTK seemed totally impossible to those who knew him.  Would they were right.  In his home, police found folders of news clippings proudly documenting his crimes.

           

In a rambling 20-minute statement at the end of the trial, Rader thanked his defense team, his social worker, the members of the jail staff, and his pastor.  He called the murders “selfish and narcisstic,” and then, shockingly, as if he were, in all truth, the final authority on what to him was still a game, he listed the mistakes the prosecution had made in the case.  Madness that rational is just plain evil.

           

That the wicked Rader will never again walk the streets of Wichita or any town or city is an absolute blessing.  One plea on the part of the district attorney was especially memorable.  She asked that the judge limit Rader’s access to pictures of animals and humans and that he be allowed no writing materials, which, she alleged, he would use to continue his fantasies. 

 

It was denied—under First Amendment guidelines.  That’s a shame. The world does not need to hear any more about Dennis Rader, even what I’m writing.

           

I do hope, honestly, that the God he worshipped throughout his life forgives him; and if I know grace at all, I reckon it’s possible.  God’s love vastly surpasses ours.

 

Maybe in Dennis Rader’s case, what David promises in this verse from Psalm 37 has happened. Really, the initials “BTK” mean almost nothing to most of us today.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see every last detail of the monstrous life of Dennis Rader disappear from the earth, just as David promises, just as the Bible says?

 

King David dreams of a better world, as all of us do, a world without Dennis Raders.

 

Lord Jesus, he’s saying, come quickly.          

A Shoshone Miracle

[With this addition, my little trip up the Missouri will end. Honestly, I didn't need to say anything at all because it's almost impossible to imagine how much has already been written about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Library shelves overflow with books, and Google will supply any interested reader with endless sights.  

I wouldn't have written what I have if the KWIT radio weren't parked as close as it is to the Floyd Monument, Sioux City's own towering obelisk that commemorates the life and notes the death of Sgt. Charles Floyd, the only man who didn't return. He was just 23 years old. 

I started at Kansas City and will finish with Sacajawea, who didn't get drafted into the Corps of the Discovery until the company was long gone from the neighborhood.

So she's last on the little tour I created. Hope you enjoyed it.]

~*~*~*~

What happened to her when she was a kid wasn't that unusual among nomadic, war-faring Great Plains tribes. When hers--the Shoshones--got into a bloody fight with another--the Hidatsas--she got herself kidnapped, lost her home, and was eventually--sad but true--sold into slavery. She was, then, only ten years old. 

All of that sounds awful today, and it was. On the other hand, it wasn't wildly unusual. What was unusual was the strange white men coming up the river, a whole number of them, sometimes dressed in ridiculous blue uniforms. It was the party of Lewis and Clark, who'd struggled up the Missouri in any way they could, bound for nobody knew exactly what--to find, those Native people must have figured, whatever it was they could at the mouth of the river, like the end of the rainbow maybe. Sickly-looking people too--so pale.

She'd got herself won in a card game after being kidnapped, both she and her friend Otter Woman, when a French-Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charboneau, who was hardly a prize, won both of them with a fair-to-middlin' poker hand, then got Sacajawea with child, this 16-year-old girl hundreds of miles from her family.

So when Lewis and Clark signed that trapper to do some scouting for them--they were up in what would be North Dakota at the time--Sacajawea was pregnant, plump as a plum. That baby, Jean Baptiste, was born mid-winter, February, 1805, while the whole party hibernated at Fort Mandan amid the Dakota icebox.

None of that happened anywhere close to Siouxland, but any string of tales told about the corps has to mention Sacajawea, without whom success would never have been anything more than a fantasy.

Let’s just be forthright, Sacajawea wasn't baggage, but a bona fide unforeseen benefit. Just 16 years old, she just happened to know her way around the neighborhood when the Missouri elbowed its way west into Montana. What's more, she knew the language! Good night, what a deal she was.

One could argue, although white people might find it hard to do, that without this girl, this kid, this teenage, unmarried mom, this Indian(!), Lewis and Clark and their much bally-hooed Corps of Discovery would never have made it to Oregon. Others would have, of course, because pale-faced folks were swarming west in numbers that seemed unending to Native people, white folks carrying diseases that would eventually wipe out tens of thousands, including most all of the Hidatsas.

In what had to be the most memorable public homecoming of the whole adventure, this young mom found herself in a Shoshone camp where she spotted, almost miraculously, her brother, Cameahwait, who was chief of the Shoshones. Astonishment—that’s what the entire corps must have felt right then.

Had Lewis and Clark made it no farther than Great Falls, there certainly would have been other explorers and frontiersmen to see the vast American riches in a country only recently purchased by a government in faraway Washington. Still, what the Corps of Discovery did was an accomplishment more impressive than any other back then, finding their way from St. Louis to the Oregon coast and the Pacific Ocean, then returning, all in a couple of years, a feat they could not have accomplished without little Sacajawea, who was carrying, for weeks of that trek, mile after mile, her own lively little bundle of joy, caring dearly for him during what months remained of the adventure. 

As remarkable an enterprise as the Lewis and Clark adventure was, and it was—their only loss being Sgt. Charles Floyd--they could not have done it without Sacajawea, that little Shoshone girl with the tiny baby, a woman who died just a few years later, in 1812, of some kind of fever.

It’s impossible to tell the story without giving her the attention she deserves. What she did must be remembered, and not just remembered either, but celebrated.

The Myth of Old Ree

It’s as much a grave as a monument. For more than 100 years, an obelisk has stood mightily atop a chunk of granite, rising twenty feet into the air, far above the Missouri River just west. It celebrates the Treaty of 1858, the Yankton Treaty, not the first among Sioux treaties, but right there among the earliest, and, like all of them a testimony to promises broken.

Across the face of the continent, undocumented immigrant aliens with white faces and hard-to-pronounce European names wanted good land occupied by Native people. Here in a town named Greenwood, it was the Yanktons who roamed and ruled a massive land triangle that began right here at the mouth of the Big Sioux.

Impossible as it may seem, the white man’s powers-that-be created a delegation of Yankton leaders and brought them to Washington, even though few of them had ever seen a town bigger than Ft. Randall.

What exactly those Yankton headmen did for four long months in the nation’s capital can barely be imagined, but history suggests that what kept them there couldn’t be classified as entertainment. Smutty Bear, one of the delegates was warned that if he didn’t sign the treaty, he’d walk back, a penalty Smutty Bear didn’t consider punishment.

Russell Means says their white hosts rolled out the barrels with uncommon frequency, trying to loosen up men who weren’t inclined to trade land for bib overalls. They loved buffalo, not pulling a share through Mother Earth.

Some say the Yankton headman Struck by the Ree finally signed the treaty when he was promised no white man would take possession of the red pipestone quarry where generations of Native people had dug stone for pipes and amulets, a sacred place.

For that—and the promise of $1.6 million over a fifty-year period--the Yanktons gave away (“ceded” is the historical term) 11 million Siouxland acres, some of it under your feet or your offices.

The name Stuck by the Ree is carved into the monument, a man, by legend, who was born when Lewis and Clark pulled the expedition over just down the hill at river’s edge. Suddenly, in the evening, the Yanktons brought a new baby to the counsel. The story—I must admit—is rooted in myth. No one wrote down what happened, but it’s been part of the Corps of Discovery story for more than a century. Here’s the good part: Lewis and Clark wrapped that baby in an American flag, then pledged that this favored child would be a leader of his people and a servant of peace.

Which, by the way, he was. He was a man of peace, but he hated the invasion coming through “the Yankton triangle.” Eventually, Struck by the Ree regretted the treaty he’d signed. “I am getting poorer every day,” he said. "The white men are coming like maggots. It is useless to resist them. They are many more than we are. We could not hope to stop them. Many of our brave warriors would be killed, our women and children left in sorrow, and still we would not stop them. We must accept it, get the best terms we can get and try to adopt their ways."

As you can imagine, Old Ree was half villain, half hero. Worship in the Catholic church would never begin until he was seated. But then there’s this: the old chief’s house was burned to the ground, his horses stolen by people who hated him.

Old Ree still cuts a vaunted figure. Just up the road from the monument, his cemetery stone is a tower, ten feet tall, most of it sculpted in his image. Makes him seem, still, the mayor of the place.

Old Ree grew up to be what the mythic Lewis and Clark predicted, a servant of peace. They had part of it right. Stop for yourself at the old cemetery and see the way he stands a head taller than the rest. What Lewis and Clark couldn’t have guessed what happened out here, or even their part in it.

But you have to admit it makes a good story—a little baby wrapped in a flag in the glow of firelight. Sure, it makes a good story.

The hero York

Let me warn you. This story violates sensibilities. It lays to ruin our corporate sense of justice and mercy, our belief in something good abiding in every human heart. What I'm about to tell you should not have happened, but it did. 

William Clark, who, after the immensely successful first-time explorations up the Missouri and across to the Yellowstone, over the Rockies, and, incredibly, all the way west to the Pacific, and then back--you know, that William Clark, who, after the most famous westcoast trip of them all, stepped into national prominence so encompassing he could have ridden down Fifth Avenue on a Rose Bowl float, had there been a RoseBowl, that same William Clark, appointed thereafter to be the commissioner of Indian Affairs, a position he held and honored for years--that William Clark, as in, you know, "Lewis and Clark, owned a slave. . .well, more than one; but, as you likely know, he took one of them along on the journey, a man named York, who Clark himself called his boyhood buddy his "playmate." 

Now don't go thinking shackles and chains. This man, York, while on the expedition, hardly fit the sad profile of what we consider a "slave." Often enough, William Clark and Meriweather Lewis stuck a rifle in York's hands--no black man back in Virginia carried a gun. Not only that, more than once York was sent out on his own to bring back victuals. I mean, he could have escaped, right?  Could have just walked away from the entire Corps operation and been over-and-done with the nation's despicable institution, could have been free as a bird. And, get this!--York got the vote a full sixty years and a Civil War before African-Americans were granted that right. You can't think of him in leg irons, but a gun, a little free time, and a vote doesn't mean Clark's York wasn't a slave.

From what we know about his behavior, it's fair to say--a little blushingly--that York was a ladies' man. Occasionally, the corps parked for a time near a band of Native husbands who appeared to consider it hospitable of them to offer their guests their wives. It's clear from the journals that York, the only black man, drew a crowd. No journals record his turning down such friendliness. 

York was a slave, even up the Missouri, when he didn't act like one--nor was he expected to. On board, he was just another grunt, and well-muscled, a valued member of the crew who did more than his share of tugging that pirogue upstream, from the bank or in the water. He was the guy you want on your team, the clean-up hitter, that mad dog outside linebacker. Were he a Hawkeye, he would have been a tight end.

It's perfectly understandable that, once home, York wanted nothing to do with slavery. He hadn't been treated like one, so he fully expected to be freed--his master, the honorable William Clark--admitted that himself. But it seems clear from his own words, that Clark got all huffy when York insisted he wanted to slam the door on slavery. He wanted his freedom, even refused to chase down some runaway slave as "his master" had demanded.

Then what? York's story has two endings. You've got a choice. One of them is the story told by William Clark. Clark claimed he'd set York up on a draying business--driving delivery wagons, a 19th century truck driver. Clark told people York's business went belly-up because York was plain-old lazy, enjoyed sleep more than work. That's Clark's story.

But there's another too, this one turned in by trappers, who claimed York, on his own, returned a place where he was loved. Those trappers claimed he just went back up the river and took up residence with the Crows--they'd seen him in the company of his wives, of whom there were four. It was, for sure, a place he was loved.

I'm happy to say right now that most 19th century historians believe the trappers.

York was a tough hombre, like all the rest of the Corps, a wilderness man who took advantage of the gifts he was given as a member of the expedition. 

Next time you walk through the Lewis and Clark Center down there at the riverfront, where he has a prominent place, give the man a smile. Do me a favor and thank him. He's a veteran who served his country even when his country didn't serve him.

York's a hero. 

Morning Thanks--Alton's south pond

 

It had been a while since I spent an hour or two out at the pond south of town, a pond that wouldn't be there if it weren't for all the work done on Hwy 60. When the DOT decided 60 should be a four-laner, overpasses galore needed to be constructed. The extra dirt needed to create hills high enough to build those overheads had to come from somewhere--why not just next door? 

So, the pond south of Alton wouldn't be there without more concrete on the highway beside it. If I were a card-carrying environmentalist, I'd have something critical to say about that, but I'm not, so I won't, at least not on Sunday afternoons in sunny October when a walk around the pond and out to the river is an in-the-flesh Sabbath blessing. 

I don't know whether any time soon there will come more days as perfect as Sunday. Rain came in last night, which suggests a front. Winter is inevitable. Me and my smart phone caught the south pond at its most glorious--bright sun, clear skies, warm temps, everything dressed in fall's tawny saffron.

The Floyd snakes through the fields like some skinny garden snake, except legions of time more slowly. Up at the spot where I sit, where the river flows straight south, any northern breeze at all appears the river itself flow upstream. Right now, it's little more than ankle-deep.

When I sat in the pickup and thumbed through the pictures, the word that came to mind is texture. Even if we've got no towering oaks to catch flame here on the prairie, what's there at the south pond is most certainly strong on texture. 

I won't try to be an art critic, but what's alive about this picture, what takes you in is not the triumph of color but the mystical appeal of texture. (And now I'm out of my league.)

We skipped our Minnesota color tour this year, couldn't quite fit it in. There's nothing quite like hardwoods turning into fantasy in the fall, blazings reds and oranges. But I'm not complaining. Yesterday's hour was a joy.  

And, sure, I might have traded Alton's south pond for a path through an oak forest at Itasca State Park, or a Vermont hillside, or maybe a place in Maine or the UP; but I'm not complaining about this little pond dug a decade ago by a heavyweight scoop on huge tires. 

All of this was there to see, and this morning, I'm thankful for little old south pond, sweetly outfitted in fall's inimitable garb.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;. . .”

I once knew a guy who was a mean drunk. There aren’t that many nights I remember from my own late teenage years, but one I do is the night that this guy just simply went off, and it took maybe three or four of us to calm him down. Violent, he got. He threatened everybody and everything around him for no particular reason at all, other than the fact that he was drunk, or so it seemed. He just lost it, as they say. I remember exactly where that happened, even where I was standing, trying to keep him from busting loose. It was late, and it wasn’t pretty.

Not long ago I saw him again, maybe for the first time in thirty years. He was singing in a men’s group whose claim to fame—or so it seemed to me—was sheer volume. There’s something inspiring about men singing big, and this group’s repertoire was traditional hymns just plain bellered. Don’t get me wrong, they sang well and I enjoyed them, but their volume was well-cranked.

The guy never threatened me, never laid a hand on me; but when I saw him up there on stage, singing hymns, the only memory that returned to me was the night he was drunk and mean.

Let me change gears a minute.

Sometimes I wonder what Christians mean when they tell those who don’t believe in Jesus Christ—or have never heard of him—that they should just read His word. I know there are saints who’ve smuggled Bibles into all kinds of countries, often under great risk. Almost every motel room I’ve ever searched has a Gideon Bible, as if people who happen to be there overnight might just pick it up and read it leisurely, no matter what version.

I’m not saying anything evil if I say that the Bible is no airport novel, and it’s certainly not a quick read. If you had never seen one before, nor ever heard a thing about Christianity, just imagine what you might think if you’d open the good book to, say, the story of Jehuh’s daughter, a perfectly innocent young girl murdered by her father because of some promise that didn’t even involve his sweet child. Bizarre.

Some passages—the moral passages, Proverbs, the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes—might just hit home, especially if you, like my boyhood friend, were a mean drunk. Or if you were his girlfriend back then, you might take some consolation from something you suspected—that his anger was as evil as you assumed it to be. Maybe, just maybe, a Gideon Bible might be just what the doctor ordered.

What I’m saying is that the admonition of this moral line from Psalm 37 is evident in the vivid memory I can’t get rid of: a drunk guy going ballistic one night years and years ago. Today, he’s singing in the choir. Still, it’s the wrath I remember.

Hamas hates Jews, and the feeling is oft-mutual. What they did just three weeks ago is, for the vast majority of living, breathing human beings, simply unimaginable. No matter. They did it.

No location on the globe is as hot and angry as the Middle East, where people on both sides of the river are never more than a glowing ember away from conflagration. Regretfully, it’s also among the holiest places on earth for three major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

What’s happening as we speak threatens even more unthinkable suffering and death in the weeks to come and makes this single line of perfectly understandable scriptural admonition feel like horrifying understatement, but no less a commandment than it was thousands of years ago.

On this we can all agree: wrath is a killer.

Morning Thanks--the uglies

I can't imagine that we'd change our minds about living out here in the country, but had I known about septic systems, I would certainly have considered how very much easier it would have been to live in town where all your burdens get flushed away into a wonderful system the city maintains. 

Any septic system carries its own sticky wickets, but doing annual maintenance is a once-a-year job I undertake in the fall. Yesterday, was October 19. The time had arrived. 

I won't burden you with the details, but it's no wonder most people call in their local Winston Rothschild III, Red Green's buddy, who took care of septic operations around the lake via his Sewage and Septic Sucking Services. (If you've never seen Red Green, his all-star Canadian show must be streaming somewhere). But then, good Calvinist that I am, I figure if you don't reach down into the depths on occasion, you've got no way of seeing the blue skies of happiness. 

Besides, where does all this squeamishness come from anyway? I've cleaned more pit toilets in my life than any human being should. These days, when I go back and visit the state park where I worked 50 years ago, those pits have become shiny Kohler porcelain bowls. What kind of adventure can you have in the natural world if the receptacle on which you position yourself looks no different than home?

Anyway, I'm saying, early this morning, that I'm thrilled my job is done, over, finished, and behind me for another year; for that, I'm greatly thankful. Normal programming will, I hope, be continued.

Reminds me of a recent visit to my doctor--no particular reason, just a checkup. He poked and pulled and listened to sounds I'm not aware of making, then checked my ears. "Got a lot of wax," he told me. He tugged a bit, then said he'd call the nurse. She came in, hefty and smiling, and, truth be told, was a good bit gentler than the doc in charge. Didn't take long and she'd hauled out the log jam, had it in front of her like a trophy. "I just love taking out ear wax," she said, smiling bigly.

Different strokes, I told myself, but I didn't say it. I don't think I said anything, just smiled back. What can you say to a woman who loves digging out ear wax? 

Double thanks this Friday morning: I'm thrilled the season's offal job is done, finished, o'er, and I'm thankful for the world's Winston Rothschilds, who handle life's disgusting jobs with skill and professionalism. I'll call him next fall.

More power to ya'.  

Cleaning up after--a short note

[With unfailing regularity, my mother used to nudge her kids along by telling us to please "clean up after." She wasn't harsh or demanding, but the injunction was so often repeated that Dad picked it up and needled her with it. "Come on now," he'd say, "we gotta 'clean up after.'"

These days I'm doing a lot of it, as does about everyone my age, I'm guessing, because after 75 years there's lots to "clean up after."

That's what I was doing when I ran across this fifteen-year-old blog post. I hadn't exactly forgotten it--but it's one of thousands. Let's just say I retrieved it from the dustbin while "cleaning up after."]

Oostburg, Wis.

Oct. 28, 1943 

Mr. and Mrs. Abe Bleeker & other relatives,

This little letter must serve to tell you the sad news of the death of my dear wife. your Aunt Gertrude, after a lingering illness. She had reached the age of sixty-one. The funeral will be held Saturday P.M. Will you tell Ray and family and Neal? You may also tell Mrs. Bleeker, Gerrit Te Krony, and any others you might think of. Maybe it might be well to tell your minister. Bemis, Palmer--was my first charge. She died yesterday at seven P.M.

 I certainly will miss her. May the Lord give strength.

 Your uncle,

J. C. Schaap

 

GOT THIS NOTE IN THE MAIL from a distant relative whose mother died in California. She was the original recipient of the letter. J. C. Schaap was my grandfather, who, in 1943, was holding forth from a pulpit in Oostburg, Wisconsin, the front window of the parsonage where he lived festooned with five stars--five children in the war effort in Europe or the South Pacific.

Grandpa was not a blogger. If he were, I'm sure he would have left a more ample record of what was in his soul, even in his bones, amid the grief at his wife's death. But these words and this letter is all there is--just the facts, and then "I certainly will miss her." The totality of his grief spelled out in just five words.

He must have sat down with paper and envelopes and a bunch of penny stamps, then written a number of similar notes to aunts and other relatives, one after another, bringing the news, a day after she died. Strains of fatigue seem evident. I'd be surprised if there weren't others in the parsonage that day, his children and in-laws beside him, helping him try to sweep up after death, as Emily Dickinson might have said.

The hand looks very steady, the lines as flat as stone, and the paper, although yellowed, looks as if the letter could well have been opened yesterday. This slip of paper has a history after it was written too. My guess is that Mrs. Bleeker likely never took it out of the envelope again. That penny stamp is cut out of the old envelope, probably a gift to a grandchild; but the letter holds its crease as if my grandma's death had taken place just a week ago.

But Mrs. Bleeker kept the letter. She never tossed it. It was, after all, significant family history. When she died, her relatives went through her stuff, where they found it with some other family things, then sent them to a relative who cared about such things; and that relative sent it to me. It sits here on my desk like an old man's hand, full of creases.

I never knew my grandmother. I'm told she was a saint. People say that she was warm and loving; I've never heard anyone say anything negative about her, including my mother, her daughter-in-law.

I'm sixty; she was only a year older when she died right there in the Oostburg parsonage.

I've doubt my children will keep this old letter when someday they stumble on it when they're sweeping up after death. I don't know that this stiff note will matter to them in the same way it does to me--after all, I remember my grandfather and I know the house in which his beloved wife died. Memories don’t give up such images easily.

When I hold what it holds so stiffly in my hands, it carries me into another life, someone else's great sadness, beclouds my worries, if only for an hour. After all, this short letter doesn't lie about life like many things tend to do.

This morning, I'm thankful for what seems as dutiful as a business letter, wrung from the soul of an anguished believer who must have felt suddenly, even in a house full of comfort, very much alone.

I'm thankful for the sparse acknowledgement of his sadness because somehow, so many years later, it's still a blessing:

"May the Lord give strength." Yes.

Ken Burns, The American Buffalo

 

Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns, who have teamed up for a worthy series of documentary films that examine is memorable detail some of the most iconic stories of American history, combined once more on The American Buffalo, which debuted on PBS this week. If you missed it, you can find it on its own website or stream it from PBS. 

The American Buffalo is beautiful, of course--we've come to expect that from the two of them--and outspoken with its spirituality. What the two of them must have decided somewhere along the line is that any discussion of North America's biggest mammal cannot be begun without acknowledging the place those millions of marvels lived in the minds and hearts, the stomachs and the souls of America's Indigenous. 

Foremost to any understanding bison is witnessing the spiritual connection Native tribes, especially from the Great Plains, had--and still have--for the buffalo. Duncan and Burns talk about it, and we eventually come to understand that they own it themselves. They get it. At one moment in the film Duncan tears up just talking about the tragedy of the Native American experience. Once, experts say, between 30 and 60 million of them--maybe more--wandered over the continent. In the early years of the 19th century, Lewis and Clark were overwhelmed when they'd come onto tens of thousands of bison in a single herd. 

The decision the filmmakers made to spend significant time with Native American history was not only right, but good, and even moral; for what happened to the buffalo happened concurrently to America's Native people. 

Christianity doesn't fare well in The American Buffalo. Good Christian people squatted on Native lands, mobbed west under the banner of Manifest Destiny, and commodified the buffalo, shot them by the dozen from turned-down windows of passenger cars they took west for sole purpose to hunting buffalo, killing them by the thousands, cutting out only their tongues, and leaving the rest to rot. White folks originated the wisdom that created the policy: if we'll get rid of the buffalo, we'll get rid of Indians. 

The abundant spirituality of The American Buffalo rests in the filmmakers' desire  to infuse the viewer with the reverence Native tribes had for their four-legged neighbors out here on the plains. The Lakota and the Omaha, the Kiowa and Pawnee, the Arikara and the Mandan--they were all buffalo hunters too, but they didn't kill for sport or money. They lived by contrary values.

In the spirit of Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, let me introduce you to my herd I tend on my harddrive, some shots I've taken throughout the years.

Springs eternal

It's not de je vu. I wish it were only that.

Not that long ago, one powerful army lined up along its borders, threatening invasion. Putin, you may remember, denied that his moving into the Ukraine was even a possibility, claimed only the West feared an invasion. Not quite two years ago, I would wake up and open my iPad, fearing the news flash that would say Russia pulled the trigger. Finally, the invasion had begun.

First thing this morning, I swung my legs out of bed and opened the iPad to see if Israel had finally unleashed war on Gaza. 

No banner headline. Relief. Not yet, anyway.

My Uncle Gerard, Dad's older brother, was likely my father's hero when they both were kids, as older brothers often are. Dad used to say, admiringly, that Gerard was a shyster, constantly getting in trouble with the old man, who, I need to say, was also the preacher. 

It was Uncle Gerard who told the story and told it more than once at family reunions. Went like this. For some naughtiness, Gerard caught Grandpa Schaap's wrath. I wish I remembered what it was exactly--maybe taunting his little brothers. The sin that begat the story is long gone. 

Uncle Gerard might have titled this "Dad's Great Wisdom," because Uncle Gerard insisted that Grandpa told him in no uncertain terms that he'd deal with his wayward boy, then added, "sometime later." 

Well, later lingered. Time passed. Days passed, still nothing. Meanwhile Uncle Gerard said he was stewing in a cauldron of his own guilt over whatever inequity prompted all of this. The fact is, he'd say, he punished himself in the interminable time it took for Grandpa to settle up on whatever it was his boy had done. In that lingering anguish between crime and punishment, little Gerard had punished himself. The story ended, always, with the same moral: something to the effect of what kind of Solomon Grandpa Schaap was.

Once, I remember, little sister Agnes objected, forcefully too. She didn't want to buy her father's matchless justice, insisting that the good Reverend could be a curmudgeon, even harsh.  

Whose view was most accurate? My dad told me he sided with his big brother. I wasn't sure. Besides, what was not to like about feisty Aunt Agnes?

Dawn comes late these days. Yesterday, I stepped out back to check the rain gauge and spotted this little torch in a bed of old cone flowers, a single stem of timothy I should have pulled weeks ago caught a shaft of morning sun that turned it into an angel. I grabbed my phone to get a picture because hope springs eternal, even in mid-October.

Hope is what I felt again this morning. Israel's vaunted military has not yet begun a war that will kill a hundred thousand people.

And, they have cause. What happened two Saturdays ago was sheer horror to a people whose cultural memory includes six million horrifying deaths at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. More than 1500 died, many of them hideously. They have cause.

Honestly, I can't imagine Uncle Gerard's version of Grandpa Schaap's disciplinary methodology is being considered somewhere at this moment in Tel Aviv. But it did come to mind when I stood there at the site of a single shaft of timothy lit with the dawn.  

In all of us, hope does spring eternal, doesn't it?--and I'm so glad it does. We couldn't live with ourselves otherwise. See that little stem lit by the dawn? Somehow, hope springs eternal. 

For that blessing, this morning, I'm thankful--edgy, anxious, but thankful. 

The Buckaroo T-shirt

I'd never heard of 3.2 beer until I got to college. Never was much of a drinker either. I drank my first cold one the summer before coming to Iowa for school. Pulled one from an old refrigerator in the basement office of the state park where I worked, a fridge we kept stocked with Schlitz and Hamms and Kingsburys, whatever we’d confiscated from under-agers on the beach. If that fridge got short, we'd go on patrol some Saturday afternoon just to restock. It was a good, healthy system.

That first beer was so cold it slid down like a dream; but then, as I remember, it'd been a hot day on the Lake Michigan shoreline. Once quitting time came, the whole crew indulged.

So, I was hardly a practiced drinker when I got to college. None of the guys who climbed in a car and drove all the way west to South Dakota did so because we loved beer or had to answer some habit. Mostly, we crossed the river because doing so was a sin, or something similar at the Christian college I attended, that little watering hole, the kind of place, mid-Sixties, where doing something because you shouldn't ad a magic way of creating its own specious of blessedness.

Took a half hour to get to the border, where the Rock and the Big Sioux put a few curves in the otherwise straight road west to a town named Hudson, a little burg moving past whatever prime it once may have had.

Decline was written in empty businesses downtown, but Hudson had a tap, a place called "The Buckaroo," where you didn't have to be 21 to belly up to the bar, not as if anyone ever asked. We'd roll in from across the river and drink Grain Belt at what?--fifty cents a glass, 3.2 beer, I was told. I had no idea what that meant.

We didn't go often—just once in a while on a Friday night, and nobody got hammered. You'd have to swallow a bathtub of 3.2 beer to get there. I remember thinking some guys seemed to need a snoot full. Not long into the evening and they'd start singing or dancing or yammering on endlessly. Some guys wanted badly to get silly. We'd toss back a few and turn into Dean Martin wannabees, then leave with a six pack or two to road load all the way back home.

Who knows why some of us loved it when so many classmates thought such South Dakota visits orgies of drunkenness, ripe transgressions of the strict college code? There were dark and sweet moments back then, when it just felt great to sin. Sometimes we'd watch the Buckaroo's noisy front door, thinking the Dean of Students would take the trip west himself just to catch sinners. Rumor had it, he did such visits. All of that made 3.2 beer even more a delight.

The Dean never showed up, and we never got caught—in 1967, dorm counselors weren't armed with breathalyzers. As sin goes, the Buckaroo was pretty darn petty. Dante didn’t bother with 3.2 beer in the Inferno, no separate and distinct level of hell.

Once upon a time I loved this old t-shirt because of the story I’m telling. I picked it up right there at the Buckaroo forty years or more after sneaking a beer or two or three at a place by the same name. Years later, my wife and I started something of a date with a visit across the river to Hudson for barbecue ribs, sinfully good. Buckaroo it was, Hudson, South Dakota, where a half a century before, a handful of Christian college students took it upon themselves occasionally to sin boldly, as Luther would have it. Well, somewhat boldly. For years, I treasured the wickedness this shirt covertly told the world.

But like my Gilson shirt, the glory of its story is long gone. If the only t-shirt I wore to the gym all winter was my dark blue Buckaroo, no one would ever cast a second glance. I’m the only one--the old man who comes there most everyday--who gets the dim-lit glory of what the shirt still conjures.

It's old and worn now, the lettering yellowed now and broken up. It's lost its punch, been outwrestled by time itself. No one gets its joke.

I’ve forever been a fan of the literary trope, memento mori, which in Latin, I’m told, means something like “remember that you die." I've always appreciated the way Hamlet holds Yorick’s skull in Act V, of crossbones just about everywhere you look in Rome.

No matter. Still hurts worse than any one of those tall cool ones ever did.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“. . .do not fret when men succeed in their ways, 

 they carry out their wicked schemes.”

Some time ago, the college where I taught celebrated its fiftieth birthday.  I was up to my ears in the celebrations, traveled the length and breadth of this continent drumming up whatever enthusiasm I could.  It was great fun, but I was glad when it was over.

There would be no college here if its first President had never taken a call to serve a church in this little town where the college sits.  His name was Bernard J. Haan, and he was a shaker and mover.  He made national news in the late 40s by keeping a movie house out of town.  The church he attended made it very clear that movies—like cards and dancing and a few other things—were what people used to call “worldly,” as in, “of this world.” 

Right here behind me, I have a picture of B. J. Haan standing in front of the church, holding forth, a young man, full of hellfire.  That he loved the camera is clearly illustrated by the fact that he took up such a hellfire and brimstone pose for a Time magazine reporter.

I need to come clean about my heritage.  There’s a mean streak in me about movies that likely harkens back several generations to grandfather clergymen—two of them—who were convinced that Hollywood was Babylon.  I came along years after their opinions lost currency.  I’ve seen movies my whole life; for a time, my son pursued graduate studies in film.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a touch of my grandfathers’ DNA because sometimes I think the entire world would be better off if a bit of that California earthquake tumbles Hollywood somewhere deep in the Pacific. (Okay, that’s going a little far.)

A bunch of years ago, the summer’s box office biggie was a remake of an idiotic TV show from the 80s—the Dukes of Hazzard.  It was stupid when it was on TV, but critics made its new version even more dopey—nothing but car chase silliness and thundering cleavage.  

You guessed it.  It made millions when it opened.  The paper I read gave it ½ of a star, out of a possible five; but it also gave the flick most of a page to say all of that, and finally, as well all know, it’s ink that counts--the buzz.  It’s no wonder Islamic extremists hate us.

Film is business, and we buy into it in spades.  Every morning thousands of Hollywood honchos check their hearts, souls, and minds, somewhere off set before work. So I wonder if B. J. Haan was wrong about Hollywood—that’s what I’m saying.  In American culture today, there aren’t many people more wicked than those who make trash.  

There, I’ve vented.

This verse, however, isn’t about my righteousness or Hollywood’s corruption.  The command is “do not fret,” so forgive my invective because I’m not listening closely.  When the Dukes of Hazzard makes millions, I shouldn’t get in a huff—that’s what David is saying.  When the wicked prosper, don’t scream or cry.  Nothing but flashes and pans.  

And there are great, great movies made all the time—so many I can’t list them. Tons.

Fifty years after B. J. Haan held forth, the theater in town has been operating for years. /truth is, it doesn't do well financially. Not a ton of business. 

I’m not sure we’re better off, but I’ve been there myself and I don’t fret.  

Much.  

"We made the room ring"

He didn't show up all that often, so when he did, old Gray-beard, their teacher, was really on edge because the Superintendent of Schools had real power. Gray-beard--that's what the boys called him--was hyper-concerned his scholars perform well. 

Francis LaFlesche's The Middle Five (1909), a collection of vignettes drawn from his boarding school days on the Omaha reservation, tells the tale of the Superintendent's visit and his quizzing the boys, an early version of the Iowa Basic Skills maybe. After a few standard questions--"Boys, who discovered America?" --and, ironically, a few wrong answers, the fat man who drove up in a black carriage, asks Gray-beard, "Are the children taught music?" Gray-beard proudly says the boys enjoy singing standard Sunday School repertoire. 

"I wish you would sing an Indian song for me," he says to the boys. "I never heard one."

And then, as they do, the heart of this story beats:

There was some hesitancy, but suddenly a loud clear voice close to me broke into a Victory song; before a bar was sung another voice took up the song from the beginning, as is the custom among the Indians, then the whole school fell in, and we made the room ring. We understood the song and knew the emotion of which it was the expression. We felt, as we sang, the patriotic thrill of a victorious people who had vanquished their enemies.

The response is unexpected. "That's savage," the Superintendent said. "That's savage! They must be taught music."

Francis LaFlesche, like his famous sisters, profited greatly from his boarding school education and became the foremost ethnologist, not only of his Omaha people, but the neighboring Osage as well. In his stories, Gray-beard doesn't fare well; this is not the only moment in the book when educated white men vividly illustrate that, culturally at least, they're, well, "savages." 

I remembered Francis LaFlesche's story last week in church when, at the end of the service, we sang "By the Sea of Crystal," a hymn which has its own slightly garbled story. A Rev. William Kuypers so loved the score of "Pomp and Circumstance" that he determined, in fine Calvinist shape, to redeem that wonderful music with a text drawn from scripture. And he did.

But the denominational hymnal committee understood that using the music was out of the question given the copywrite, so they created a contest--who could create the finest musical score to carry this new lyric created by Rev. Kuipers?

The committee received--get this!--150 entries, and chose first, second, and third place, then opted, oddly enough (some rumors were afloat), that the new hymnal--the very first (1934) to contain hymns--would publish this brand new hymn, set with the score of one of the contest's honorable mentions. Go figure.

"By the Sea of Crystal" became the theme score of the broadcast ministry of the Christian Reformed Church, the Back to God Hour. Had you asked, my dad would be thrilled to tell you that one of the grandest eras of his life was his six years on the national board, which means that whenever we sing that old hymn (not often), Dad has this strange habit of showing up.

No one ever called "By the Sea of Crystal" savage, and if singing it were ever banned anywhere in the land, I'd be shocked. But last Sunday, I couldn't help but think that what little Frank LaFlesche remembered from his boarding school days was a phenomenon that others have also experienced. 

Magically, music opens itself up to layer after layer of rich, human experience that can and does tumble out totally on its own, as if there were no such thing as time, even "savage" music.

I don't mean to minimize what's behind the incident Francis LaFleshe remembers during the Superintendent's visit. It is, whether consciously or not, naked cultural prejudice. 

I only mean to express the immensity of our shared human experience. What little Frank experiences, he does because music has carried him back to beauty itself. That phenomenon, I dare say, is something we all know.