Mysteries

The church was packed. Mom would have liked that. And all five "first ladies" were in attendance--she would have liked that too. She would have appreciated that Melania came, even though her husband couldn't--and that wouldn't have surprised her either. 

Wonderful things were spoken. All kinds of people gave Rosalynn Carter unending homage for her zeal in caring for "the least of these." Mom would have noted that was something we're all called to do.

Today, Mom would appreciated President Carter's startling move of including Rosalynn in cabinet meetings. Mrs. Carter insisted on it, but then so did he. Jimmy, the President, always claimed that any successes he'd ever achieved came his way because of his able and attentive spouse, who was more than happy--insistent even--on offering her opinion on matters of politics and state. 

Mom appreciated the way Rosalynn and Jimmy filled their pockets with nails, picked up a hammer and saw, and helped out on Habitat homes, a former President and his first lady sweating in the noonday sun--imagine that! And she would have appreciated the little stories people told yesterday, like her son's story of how his mother had pulled out a Tupperware tub right there on the plane and started making sandwiches. The people on board "couldn't believe it," her son told the mourners. "But she loved people."

I think Mom might have been surprised to realize, as some claimed, that Rosalynn Carter, throughout her life, had a special regard for the down-and-out, those disadvantaged by life itself, and for her unending work on the part of care-givers. Mrs. Carter was a global humanitarian who worked for nothing less than peace, even in the Middle East.

Mom might have even shed a tear when she heard Rosalynn's longtime aide and friend describe her thusly: "Wife, mother, business manager, political strategist, diplomat, advocate, author. Yet what I remember most about her was her tireless dedication to taking care of others." 

Yesterday, November 28, was Mom's birthday. She's been gone for just about exactly a decade. One November Friday of 2013, an oncologist told her she had inoperable cancer. On Monday next, she died, her quiet leave-taking a very special gift.

I thought of Mom during Rosalynn's tribute service in Atlanta yesterday, remembered it was her birthday, and couldn't help imagining what she would have thought of the whole event. She walked into my memory when that packed Atlanta audience rose to sing "Blessed Assurance! Jesus is Mine." If I know my mother, I can't imagine she wouldn't have shed a tear just then--'oh, what a foretaste of glory divine." My parents' headstone is engraved with the opening line of that fine old hymn.

Right then, I'm sure my mother's knees would have buckled, her breath would have staggered, and her lip would have curled. She would have had to reach for a hanky from that little TV table that, by the end, held just about all she needed to get along. "Blessed Assurance" would have brought Mom to Mrs. Carter's Atlanta celebration, despite the dark reality she could not forget: Rosalynn Carter was a Democrat.

Just exactly how someone like my mother--so much more like Rosalynn Carter than Melanie Trump--could end her life as a torch-bearer for the Orange Jesus is a question I'd love to hear her answer today, a decade later, in realms of glory. 

Should Mom be somewhere today where a massive big-screen TV stretches across a heavenly sky, and should she have watched Mrs. Carter's Atlanta tribute, I'd like to think she would have loved every minute of it, every last thing. 

Who knows? Maybe the two of them would have watched it together. Why not? In the new heavens and the new earth, lions and lambs snuggle. "This is my story/this is my song. . ."

You know the words.

The 1888 Blizzard--Willie Holst

Snow fell that morning, early, even before children left for the schoolhouse, two miles away for some, occasionally more. Kids loved the morning's fleecy stuff, coming down over their shoulders like feathers, crashing, even splashing against caps and jackets or just sitting there like some crystalline pin until before it slowly melted away. They were accustomed to the sharp stuff that rode in on a bitter northwest wind and threatened to remove your face if you didn't turn away from its sting. The morning of the great 1888 blizzard, "the Children's Blizzard," was warm and lovely and unlike anything the children had ever seen.

In a rural school near Hartington, Nebraska, the teacher and the older kids met quietly up front to map out a strategy for the monster howling away just outside the door. Together, they decided it was too dangerous to send the anyone home, that, instead, they should just simply focus on keeping them all at school until the snow would finally abate, which meant until the next morning. That meant--an overnight in the schoolhouse.

By noon, the snowfall was no longer pretty or delicate. Whatever fell before the temperature did, laid a sloppy blanket over everything, a mat that froze solid on sopping wet caps and gloves and winter coats. By late morning, the snow was fine as flour, people said later, so Willie Holst, who lived no more than a stone's throw from school, suddenly realized his eyelashes were frozen shut.  

He hadn't figured on frozen eyelashes. What had sent him out on a heroic relief mission just before were bawling children who missed their moms and dads, claimed they were hungry, and just did their own kind of howling for no particular reason. Willie Holst told Miss McNeal he would brave the monster outside, run home, and pick up some victuals for the little ones. But when he realized he was blinded by the blizzard's barrage, he stopped, then simply turned around--going anywhere was just too big a risk. Not a one of those children was going to die of hunger, not in just one night, he told himself. You best not chance it. 

Like so many others right then throughout the plains just then, he grabbed a line fence to guide him slowly back to the schoolhouse, hand over hand. Try as he might, Willie Holst didn't find the schoolhouse, just couldn't see it in the wind and snow. He kept his wits about him, measured ten wide steps to the left of the fence and found nothing, switched to other side, measured ten more to the right, but still found nothing. With that guiding wire back in his hand, he tried those same fifteen steps forward. "I had taken just a few steps," he says, "when I smashed against the schoolhouse with such force that I was knocked backward and got a bad bump on my head."

He never saw it. He was that close and that far away. Blinding snow fell so thick that what seemed across the section was an arm's length from him, and he still couldn't see. The blizzard of 1888 endangered the lives of hundreds, even thousands of children. Hundreds died, some of the bodies weren't found until spring. There would not be another Blizzard of 1888. 

Willie Holst, just kid himself, saved his own life by making the right choice, turning around and going back to Miss McNeal. By the time the storm had broken early the next morning, not a one kid had suffered from hunger; but all around, late that afternoon and early evening, hundreds hadn't reached home and never would.

So what happened to the big kids?--what happened to Willie Holst? "That was my last day of school," he says at the end of his memories of January 12, 1888.

The Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888*

 

A January thaw is what all of us look forward to right now, a breath of warmth that reopens our hope that someday soon April will return. Two cold-of-winter days, maybe three, of forty degrees. No wind.

Heaven comes to Siouxland.

That’s the relief people felt early on January 12, 1888, when most of those who’d put down homesteads had just arrived.

Here’s how David Laskin describes that morning:

Everyone who wrote about January 12 noticed something different about the quality of that morning—the strange color and texture of the sky, the preternatural balminess, the haze, the fog, the softness of the south wind, the thrilling smell of thaw, the “great waves” of snow on the prairie that gleamed in the winter sun.

And then this: “The one aspect they all agreed on was the sudden, welcome rise of temperature.” A January thaw, a morning to remember, but a balmy prelude to horror.

Laskin’s book, The Children’s Blizzard, tells the story. When that strange warmth suddenly lifted, hundreds of people, most of them children, perished in a blizzard that made prairie skies dark as night and created massive drifts in winds that drove crystallized snow into your face so ferociously it filled up what flesh it didn’t tear away.

Seven miles east of Freeman, South Dakota, five boys died, lost in the unremitting blast of snow. Three of them were Kaufmanns--Johann, Heinrich, and Elias. What they and two other boys intended was simply to get to safety at the Graber house, a quarter mile east of the school, Ratzlaff #66. The wall they hit was a zero-visibility blizzard.

The victims’ families were all “Schweizers,” German-speaking Mennonites booted from Russia, who’d come to the Dakota Territory with fifty other families seeking the religious freedom they’d looked to find for 200 years--and the opportunity to live a good and safe life. None of them had it easy; sometimes their children would alternate attending school because families didn’t have shoes enough to go around.

But there was promise here in Dakota.

Then came “the Children’s Blizzard.”

Those five Freeman boys just disappeared; and even though search parties went out the next morning in the swirling remnants, no one found them until three days later, on the Sabbath, when a man spotted an arm jutting from a snowbank, an arm belonging to the eldest Kaufmann, Johann, who was likely holding up a coat to shield the younger boys from the killer.

They ended up two-and-one-half miles southeast of Ratzlaff #66, buried by the blizzard, just forty feet from the farm house of the man who found them.

The story goes that man went to church with the news that Sunday. I don’t know if he interrupted worship. I don’t know what they might have been singing, but I can guess how hard they prayed.

No one knows precisely how many people perished in that massive blizzard. Most estimate the grim death toll at somewhere near 250.

It all began with a sweet January thaw that quick as a fox descended into madness. At Valentine, Nebraska, the temperature was 30 degrees at 6 a.m., six degrees at two in the afternoon. and 14 below at nine that night.

Somewhere out in south central Nebraska you’ll find a highway marker that tells that neighborhood’s chapter of the story, but there’s nothing up at all east of Freeman, where five boys died. There’s no sign, no story, only endless rows of corn and soybeans. Even the farms are gone.

All the way from Russia, those Schweizers carried with them an old Mennonite hymn, something with a first line that went like this: “Wherlos und verlassen sehnt sich oft mein Herz nach stiller Ruh”—“When I’m lonely and defenseless,/my heart longs for rest and peace.”

Maybe that Sunday, that old favorite was the one they went back to, all of them. If not that Sunday, surely the next.

_________________ 

*Published first on January 13, 2017. I'd like to tell a few more stories drawn from that famous blizzard, an event which had to be the biggest story in the neighborhood for many years. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“But their swords will pierce their own hearts, 

and their bows will be broken.”

 

To his credit, Saul didn’t want the job.  In fact, he even hid when chosen. He was a local farmer, a head taller than most people, remarkably handsome. But he wanted no part of being Israel’s first king. In a way, that’s good. It speaks humility. 

 

What’s more, he changed his mind only because Israel faced a crisis. No one bribed him; he took the job to which he was divinely appointed only because his people needed him. Nabash the Ammonite, threatening the city of Jabesh with vastly superior forces, told the people he would accept their surrender only if each male would give the Ammonites his right eye, a sure way to ensure continuing victories.

 

To counter, Saul played a card from a similar deck. He hacked up his oxen, and his men delivered the chunks to the people of Israel, telling them that unless they acted all their livestock would meet a similar fate. Soon enough, he had an army. Soon enough the city of Jabesh was spared. Saul was a hero—and he was King.

 

It didn’t take long for his reign to spiral into disobedience and decay, and the cause was understandable: he began to trust himself more than the Lord. Excuse my saying it, but that’s well, to be expected of most all of us.

 

Specifically, when he saw his army dissipate before battle with the Philistines, he took upon himself the task of religious sacrifice, thereby disobeying God, who had commanded that only Samuel, his anointed prophet, could undertake the ritual sacrifice. 

 

Samuel was furious. He told the King that God would replace him with someone God himself would choose, a man, Samuel told him, who had a heart like God’s own. 

 

Not long after, King Saul won an impressive victory over the Amalekites, but rather than destroy the entire army as God had commanded, Saul took their King, Agag, alive, a kind of trophy. Likewise, his soldiers kept Amalekite livestock, such plunder traditionally a conquering army’s wages. But both acts were disobedient.

 

Samuel grieved deeply over Saul’s flagrant arrogance, and God commanded his prophet to anoint another king. Enter David, a 16-year-old shepherd boy with no military experience, little gravitas, and absolutely no name recognition. 

 

After a miraculous one-on-one defeat of the giant Goliath however, David needed no one to market his importance. Soon he was the champion of the masses, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the still reigning King. King Saul grew frightfully paranoid about the would-be king, even mad. Several times, he tried to kill him.  Amazingly, David stayed loyal. The King no longer ruled but was ruled by a fanatical obsession to kill the boy who’d never been disloyal.

 

With the nation in disarray, the Philistines mounted another assault, and Saul, seeing defeat, killed himself rather than suffer the humiliation of capture and torture—he purposefully fell on his sword. 

 

The moral lesson of all of this could hardly be missed by the shepherd boy, Saul’s reluctant successor, a man after God’s own heart. Is the story of King Saul the precise derivation of this line from the song of Psalm 37? It seems impossible not to believe that it couldn’t be. 

 

But the reason it’s here is assurance—ours. In the long run, the wicked, whoever they might be, won’t prosper. That’s the simple truth David wants to offer for our comfort.  He knew—perhaps like no one else—how true it was and is.

Morning Thanks--Innocence

On a winter day that could well have passed for May just a couple of years ago, my wife and four-year-old granddaughter went for a walk, along with half the rest of the town. The weather was perfect, and a blessing.

“So, Joce,” my wife asked, “what do you think you’d like to be when you grow up.” She was soon to be five and very sophisticated.

“I’d like to put on make up,” she said, “or else I’d like to be a doctor, or maybe work in a grocery store.”

Okay. That answer makes perfectly clear why Jesus Christ put so much stock in little kids. And it’s no wonder, really, why innocence-to-experience stories are the soul of so much of the world’s great fiction. Innocence is such a treasure to leave behind.

It’s a blessing when you have it and even to remember it when it’s long, long gone.

I’m thankful for it, for innocence, that is, this morning.

___________________ 

Morning Thanks--Thanksgiving

 My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast; 

I will sing and make music.  Psalm 57

I need to thank Garrison Keillor for drawing my attention to this verse of Psalm 57—not in so many words, but in spirit. I need to thank him for reminding me in an interview in Christian Century that the Christian life begins in gratitude. The source of faith itself is certainly elsewhere and mysterious beyond my ken, but gratitude is the starting block for what ye olde’ theologians called sanctification.  “I will sing and make music” is David’s brash pledge, his testimony of how he will live. He says it because he knows God’s promises are sure, his faithfulness will ooze into all generations, and beyond, upward and forever outward into eternity itself.

Here’s what Garrison Keilor said:

Thank you, Lord, for this amazing and bountiful life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for this laptop computer and for this yellow kitchen table and for the clock on the wall and the cup of coffee and the glasses on my nose and for these black slacks and this black T-shirt. . . .Thank you for the odd delight of being 60, part of which is the sheer relief of not being 50.

And then he said, “One should enumerate one's blessings and set them before the Lord. Begin every day with this exercise.”That’s the idea that birthed this blog 2500 posts ago, trying to begin each day with gratitude, making a discipline of thanksgiving. Sometimes thanks comes easy as breath itself; sometimes, come the wee hours of the morning, it’s just plain hard work.

What he said in that Christian Century interview grabbed me because I sometimes feel too much the curmudgeon as I creep into those supposedly blessed, therefore golden years.  A friend of mine once made the claim that the doctrine of sanctification—that believers, as they age, inch closer and closer to the Lord, to godliness—is really a myth. “Most old guys I know,” he says, “are crotchety.” 

And they are. It’s an itch I’ve been scratching too much myself.   

It all starts with praise, Keillor says:  “Gratitude is where the Christian life begins.”  We all ought to work at it, he reminds us.  “Begin every day with this exercise. . .”  That idea struck me as priceless, so that’s what I’ve been trying to do for years already--there's the quote up top of the page.

Maintaining a discipline of gratitude with dawn’s early light hasn’t morphed me into some kind of saint.  You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.   

But neither has not been, for me, a waste of time.  Not at all. I’m not a great a singer, but I make my own kind of music here in front of a screen in the basement. And for that—for my music and the source of its energy and Garrison Keillor’s sweet reminder of something I’ve always known—for all of that, I’m thankful. 

Hear my song. 

__________________  

Morning Thanks -- Doing Dishes

Okay, maybe I was not thrilled. It's my job to clean up after Sunday dinner,
but just because I know what I have to do doesn't mean I relish doing it. My
wife cooked it all, so she ran off to play with her grandson. I do the clean-up.

I was scraping dishes all by my lonesome, when I realized my father-in-law,
who's 97, was standing close by. Age has troubled his physical movements. He
was at the controls of a walker. He needs a wheelchair, but understands that he
will be sentenced to one all too soon. There he was, a couple arm reaches away,
dreaming he could help.

He used to do everything for his invalid wife. When she died, he helped with
dishes here, carting dirty glasses and dishes from table to kitchen counter. He
used to do what he could. No more. There's very little he can.

There he stood, in silence, tap water running in the sink in front of me when it
dawned on me how much he would have loved being able to do what I was
doing, how much he would have wanted walk down our stairs and get down
on the floor with his daughter and great-grandson. All of a sudden I knew he
would have done anything to help--done dishes alone, spent all afternoon in
the kitchen, if he could somehow make himself useful.

With him beside me, that walker between us, in my soapy hands just for a
moment those dirty dishes turned into a blessing. And that's why this morning I'm thankful for washing dinner dishes, even humbled by so much I can do.

___________________

Barbara's dad died on Wednesday, August 14, 2019. at Prairie Ridge Home, Orange City, Iowa, having outlived all his nine siblings. He was 100 years old. 

Morning Thanks--A child of the King

Most Reverend and Rightly Honorable Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has an impressive resume. After taking degrees from Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, and before entering the ministry, he spent several years in international business, living in Paris and doing extensive development work in African countries, especially Kenya and Nigeria.

Although he and his wife Carol are the parents of two sons and three daughters, those who know him claim a major influence in his life was the tragic death of another of his daughters in a car crash. That accident didn't precipitate his determination to become a man of the cloth; he'd been an active lay leader in churches wherever their family lived since he and his wife were married.

When he left international business for the ministry, he entered St. John's College, Durham, and focused his attention on business ethics. But since taking religious office he has worked more extensively as a peacemaker, both at home in England and abroad, especially in Africa where he has both training and experience. A number of his parishes have become revitalized after his ministry there. He was, to many, a blessed choice for the office of Archbishop of Canterbury, succeeding Dr. Rowan Williams.

All of that is wonderful, but so is a peculiarly startling discovery. Rev. Welby's mother drank hard, even though now, blessedly, she's been sober for 45 years. When her son was born, she lived what you might call a profligate life. There are other ways of describing it, but I'm sure the British would appreciate some restraint.

His father was Gavin Welby, a man who peddled whiskey. "His father’s family," says the pastor's web page, "were German Jewish immigrants who moved to England to escape antisemitism in the late 19th century and integrated quickly."

DNA proved otherwise. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the illegitimate son of Anthony Montague Brown, Winston Churchill's personal secretary. His mother acknowledges the affair but had always believed the man she'd married (and eventually divorced) was her son's father. Paternity tests say otherwise.

All of that unfaithfulness is no fault of the pastor's own, of course. He had no choice. In a sense, the truth made everyone free.

You're reading the story right now because of what the Most Reverend Justin Welby told the press. "There is no existential crisis, and no resentment against anyone," he said proudly. "My identity is founded in who I am in Christ."

Always thankful for the story of a child of the King.

___________________

In July of this year, Lady Jane Williams, the Most Reverend Justin Welby's mother, passed away, peacefully. She was 93 years old, having had a remarkable life, working for Winston Churchill and Professor Sir Ernst Chain, a Nobel Prize winner.

Her son Justin claimed his mother's life was "full of grace, laughter and joy." His official testimony of his mother's life began this way: "It's with prfound sadness that I mourn the loss of my mother. I loved her very deeply and it has been a privilege to be her son." 

"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints."

Morning Thanks--a room of my own*

There is one little basement window above my head and to the right. On mid­winter days, the sun rides so low in the southern sky that for a time in early afternoon it shines directly in my face, which means I can't work here--at least not on the computer. Any other time of day or year, this little corner of my basement is a sweet place to sit--warm in winter, cool in summer.

There is, after all, comforting silence all around, the opportunity to be very much alone. Virginia Woolf forever linked the phrase to the plight of women artists, but she'll forgive me, I think, if a male such as I abscond with her line right now because I think the necessity of what she points out--that we all need our own space--transcends the gender wars. Everybody may know your name in your neighborhood Cheers, but solitude is a blessing, a joy, even a requirement for the work I do.

So, this morning, here, in this corner of my basement, early in the morning, I'm thankful for a room of my own. And yes, it is a bit of a mess.

_____________________ 

*When I started to blog--2006 or 07 maybe--everything originated from my basement study in the old Jongewaard house, where we lived for 25 years or more, where we raised our children. That old clunky desktop has long-ago been replaced (more than once for sure); that printer is far better than the cheapie I have beside me now; the desk is the same, although it's dark gray today, painted when we moved, 12 years ago. The chair's the same--Aeron from Zeeland, MI, bought it, factory second, right from the back door of Herman Miller years and years ago. Wouldn't change it for the world. The stereo is now a smart speaker. If this were a better picture, you'd find much the same clutter as you'll find on the shelves full of books--more here actually--that now surround me.

This week, Thanksgiving week, I'll just pull out some old "morning thanks," blog posts from thousands of posts through the years. The old Garrison Keillor line, as if it were scripture itself, is still up top, even though I failed miserably. The kind of commitment I started with was too indomitable a target. This was going to be a gratitude journal, but giving daily thanks every morning for something different is a task for a better man than I am. 

Anyway, all week this week, some old "Morning Thanks" posts.

And, oh yeah, there's new "stuff in the basement." I was a late-minute stand in for Jonis Agee, a Nebraska novelist just last Sunday night in Omaha; the stand-in got the prize: the 2023 Word Sender Award, this great sculpture. It's new down here. Just a week old.

 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“. . .but the Lord laughs at the wicked,

 for he knows their day is coming.”

I don’t remember things like this happening when I was younger, but more and more these days it seems that the victims of violent crime are given opportunity in court, once the verdict is set, to speak to the guilty. It’s not an exercise I enjoy watching. No matter how despicable the crimes, those frequently emotional diatribes don’t offer much joy. Venting may feel good, but most often, it’s not pretty because vengeance in the human spirit, no matter how understandable, is almost always unbecoming. Witness the war in Gaza.

Maybe if it was my daughter or grandson who was murdered, I would see it differently. Maybe if I’d suffered as some have, I’d want to take a few shots myself.

I hope and pray I never find myself in that position.

It’s anthropomorphic—this line in David’s psalm. One can’t help but get the impression that a smirking God is exactly the kind of deity David would like to believe in because, he is himself snickering at the plight of the wicked. The whole movement of this part of this psalm is to assert dramatically and unforgettably just exactly how far the righteous stand apart from the wicked: the meek get joy and bounty; the evil get hell. That’s why God laughs, David says. He knows what it’s going to be like when he turns up the heat.

I like the image of God laughing, but I’m uneasy at why, in David’s description he is in full guffaw, in part because God seems, well, almost disinterested—as if the drama unfolding in front of him is theater, as if he’s even entertained by what goes on in his creation, a season-ticket holder at the pageant of this world’s ordinary life.

It’s impossible to say that God doesn’t do what David says he does in this verse, and therefore wrong to assume that this is simply poetic license. I know enough of God to know that I'm nowhere near to knowing everythhing. I rather like the Lakota idea of Wakan Tanka as “the Great Mystery.”

And I am quite sure—because I’m human—that I could feel just like those murder victim’s mothers and fathers and husbands and wives, standing up there in front of the victim’s killer, wailing away. I know I could feel exactly what David does.

When the Allied liberators stumbled on the concentration camp at Dachau, what happened wasn’t pretty. The skeletal prisoners—the living and the dead—were such a horrifying shock to the liberators that ordinary soldiers became cold-blooded killers. There are reports of GIs giving prisoners their machine guns and simply allowing them to kill the hated Nazi guards. All of that—especially if you’ve seen boxcars loaded with corpses—is somehow perfectly understandable. But was it right?

Does God giggle at evil men and women? I honestly don’t know. Maybe he does.

David’s giving him that human characteristic offers us—me too—some human joy, but I wonder if we’re not finding out more about King David, God’s beloved, than we are the nature of the Lord of Hosts, because I hope that my God doesn’t snicker at sinners. 

Terschelling (2)

One can only sit here and imagine who I would be, I suppose, if that Schaap family, C. C. and Neeltje, never got taken with this "new country" business. The best questions rarely have easy answers.

And yet, this much is clear. If the Schaaps had stayed, I wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t be who I am at all. Even though it’s always struck me as foolish, even deadly, to presume that we are nothing more than the sum of our experience, it’s just as silly to assert that the America west of Ellis Island hasn’t shaped me through four generations. It’s silly of me to imagine who I might be because if they’d stayed there, I most certainly wouldn’t be a me at all.

And since there wouldn’t be, the truth I’m left with is worth celebrating. Thank goodness they left this lovely island. Thank goodness their son married a preacher’s daughter in America, who bore my father, who then found a wife and brought me into this world, cultural light years from Terschelling’s ancient lighthouse tower.

But if all that’s true, then why am I drawn to sit here and dream of what might have been? This is, after all, my second visit to the island. Why do I look dreamily at this landscape and ask unanswerable questions? Why do so many of us travel to County Galway, the Rhine Valley, Hunan Province, Krakow, Yucatan, or even the Ivory Coast? What draws us back to a place of origin, years and generations removed?

The best questions are based in mystery, I suppose, and our mortal selves seem forever drawn to such mysteries as emerge, for me at least, from the sandy soil of the island of Terschelling. Maybe it’s not the place itself that attracts me, but the questions such places pose inescapably when we visit them, the most fundamental questions of our own mysterious selves.

Emerson claimed that traveling is a fool’s paradise, deluding empty-headed people into believing that what they discover in faraway places is somehow more enlightening than what they could well discover in the unexplored regions of their own human souls. I like Emerson, always have, even though he strikes me as a man I’d rather know in a book than next door.

But I don’t know that I buy his argument. I don’t think of myself as a fool today. This afternoon yet, I will leave Terschelling with just a bit of the reluctance my great-grandparents likely had more than a century ago, yet not without some anticipation too, anticipation they must have felt themselves as they watched the lighthouse disappear slowly from the North Sea horizon.

I’m going home. On this island, no matter how delightful its seacoast villages, how charming its centuries-old lighthouse, and how redolent with my own family lore, today I am little more than another tourist toting a Nikon.

Terschelling is not my home. For better or for worse, I am who I am, no matter what the mysteries of my origins--or yours--no matter what I may have been. My home is far away.

I knew all of that before I came, I suppose, but I didn’t know it as fully as I do now, having been here. And that fuller realization has made it worth coming, that single idea--and, oh yes, the island’s miles of sandy beaches, its quaint towns, and a huge lighthouse, centuries old.

I’ll probably come back to Terschelling. I'd love to. I don't think it's quite finished with me. It’s a beautiful place, as full of seafaring history as it is the silence of my own mystery. That’s what I’ve discovered on the island. I may be no smarter than I was before I came, but, having been here, I’m no fool either.

Terschelling and Home

Today is Dutch-American Day, I'm told. It seems as if I've spent most of my life referencing my ethnic and religious background, but here's an old essay that links me to the old world from which just about all my greats came in the late 1860s.

On the North Sea island of Terschelling, the Netherlands, the old lighthouse tower is the landscape’s dominating feature. It rises like a huge, tawny missile from the heart of the largest village, West Terschelling, a harbor town of a thousand souls or so–and a whole lot fewer, come winter. From the ferry that gets you here, the old Terschelling tower seems to grow from the island’s southern-most corner, its highest dune. Today, it’s festooned at the top by technology’s newest search equipment; otherwise, pillar-like, it looks the same as it did 130 years ago, on the day my great-grandparents left Terschelling behind forever on their way to America.

Some Dutch folks have made a game out of identifying country hamlets by the shape of their cathedral spires against a cloudy Dutch sky. But West Terschelling’s most active church barely peeks over the orange roofs of old village homes. It’s the tower that dominates, a square fortress of telescoping dusky sections that guided ship traffic through rough seas all around, and today attends the burgeoning tourist culture, the island’s major industry.

For hundreds of years it has stood there. My great-grandfather, leaving the island in 1865, would have seen it last from whatever vessel he and his young family boarded as emigrants. I would like to think he wasn’t nostalgic as he looked at what he left, but he had to be. The island of Terschelling is a beautiful place.

Far to the north in another small town, he would have seen the spire of the Reformed Church he’d likely attended, a place where lay the mortal remains of generations of his ancestors. Somewhere amid the long line of green fields on the eastern coast of the island, his own family home would have stood, adjacent to whatever land he worked. With two children, a young wife, and little more than a dream of a better life, he must have left with some second thoughts. He couldn’t have looked back on Terschelling without knowing he was leaving home.

The empty masts of a hundred leisure ships sit perfectly still in the harbor today, lines and ropes running down diagonally as if spinning an elaborate web between a perfect arrangement of toothpicks. In the background, the orange roofs of the village lay flat as slate against hillside dunes that descend toward the harbor, where all one can see is streets and storefronts grabbing tourists’ attention.

This morning the low Dutch sky hangs like a false ceiling above the North Sea.

Whatever winds blow carry a palpable dampness so thick it hugs everything--beneath my pen, the paper in the tablet curls up in its own thickness. Terschelling people like to say the sun shines more on the island than it does on the mainland, but one wonders about objectivity in a tourist haven like this.

What my great-grandfather wouldn’t have seen from the ship leaving the harbor may well be the island’s most distinguishing feature, for out there beyond the old towns is a coastline preserve of rolling dunes that seem untouched, except for the ubiquitous Dutch bike paths. In the years that have passed since my great-grandparents left, no other area of the Netherlands has likely changed less than the low-rolling dunes that huddle over most of the island. There’s more open space on Terschelling than most anywhere on the Dutch mainland. At some spots along that bike path, one can survey a range of sand hills that roll as far as the eye can see, the very same view my own ancestral family may well have admired.

There was enough good land to support him as a farmer here, but my great-grandfather could certainly never escape the sea. Perhaps that’s why, in the family genealogy I have, Cornelius C. Schaap is described as landbower and zeeman--farmer and sailor. Terschelling’s farmland is as beautiful as anything in the American midwest–where I live and his family immigrated; but here on the island the sea is everywhere. He and his family must have stood here on some still-existing promontories and admired the open horizon of water, just as I am this morning, a view he wasn’t about to see in on the great American prairies, where he tried to put down roots and finally left this earth altogether.

The air is fresh and salty. At the water’s edge, a single mason chisels stones. His hammer rings occasionally. He works slowly. The hum of a few automobiles carries along the shoreline on the fresh sea breeze, and all the way on the other shore of the island the grunt of an earthmover I saw earlier this morning snorts like some giant sea creature. Things change here. Nothing really stays the same. Terschelling isn’t the island he left.

Still, I wish I knew which house he and his family left behind. I’d like to see it, stand beside it, even walk through it; but I know that while the frame might be the same, the foundation still constructed of anciently-placed fieldstone, time itself will have significantly remodeled the place, wherever it is.

This morning, when I look over this Terschelling landscape and try to see it as M’neer Schaap and his wife must have 150-some years ago, I can’t help but wonder who I would be if they had put aside their restlessness or theological discontent or anxious dreams of freedom, and just stayed here. If C. C. had pulled on his wooden shoes and walked to the barn instead of the harbor, I wonder what would life be like for me here today, living here on Terschelling, a resort island known for beaches where clothing is optional.

The churches here are historic, landmarks on the walking tour, but mostly silent today, even in summer when the place swarms with tourists. 

If the Schaaps had stayed, would I still be a believer? Am I simply the passive recipient of a faith I was bequeathed with a chaotic juxtaposition of time and place? Is my faith as historically pinioned as that lighthouse? What would I believe? Who would I be? How fully are we shaped by the world we apprehend?

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more tomorrow.  . .

How should we sing?

I had to be less than ten. We visited the United Nations—I don’t know why really, or why or when we may have been in New York City. I was just a kid, but I have some kind of memory of standing in front of the UN, but no memories of being inside.

Two images from those New York City streets have stayed with me. A woman who seemed mad was screaming wildly. What she said made no sense, as I remember; but the scene was deeply distressing. Hundreds of people walked right past her. Someone should tell her not to scream, I thought; it’s so disturbing. But no one did, and she kept it up. The Schaaps didn't stop either. Finally, we were out of earshot.

On another street corner stood a man in a sandwich board saying “Repent” or something. I don't recall what the sign said, but I had the same feeling I did when that mad woman wouldn’t stop screaming. This guy was preaching--I knew that; but it felt repulsive, and I was embarrassed. I didn’t want him harping on a Christian faith I knew better by the warmth of Christmas eve or morning prayers with Dad over Sugar Pops.

Our pastor tells the tale of a young man with Down Syndrome in a previous congregation, a kid who had a special love for the way a certain organist would play. Whenever she was at the keys, he’d dance in the aisles.

A man down the block loves to sit outside with his boombox on sweet Sunday afternoons and crank up “The Old Rugged Cross." A men’s quartet with bluegrass roots takes over the neighborhood.

In Psalm 57, David is almost gone in his affection for the God who has saved him so often. He's been delivered once more. It’s as obvious as the nose on his face, so he’s going to sing: “I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations; I will sing of you among the peoples.”

But how? And what tune? what key? And how loud? Snare drums or Native flutes? Bold type or fancy font? Stories or poems? Footnotes or exclamation marks? Classical, folk rock, hip-hop? Johnny Cash or Mahalia Jackson? Marilynne Robinson or the 700 Club? Air Jordans or flip-flops? Just how do we best serve?

A blog is just another sandwich board, I suppose, just another venue for gratitude. 

Daily, I too, hold up a sign.

Sing the songs of wailing women and skinny men in sandwich boards. Dance down the aisles. Fill the neighborhood with Johnny Cash. The older I get, the more I think the answer to the difficult questions is simply this: just sing the songs of love and let the Lord of Hosts create the harmony.

Swastika

 

It's a hide painting, one of four the museum displays, and it tells a story, as many hide paintings do. It's always a little trying to tell some visiting fourth graders that Native people had no written language back then--they had language, of course, but no one attempted to write it down, which means, of course, that there are no love letters, no constitutional amendments, no grocery lists, no histories. 

They had to make do, and they did, quite gloriously, as this particular hide painting documents. Their histories are in the drawings. I can't be sure, but I'm quite confident that there is a particular fight here. What we're told is that the story here is The Battle of Twin Buttes. But there wasn't such a thing as the battle of Twin Buttes, not even in a theater near you. 

This hide drawing is not just some imaginative Native artist creating a horror scene-- even though it is a horror scene. A row of cavalry fire their rifles from behind a barrier of some sort and into a village--see the tipis? Significant bloodletting is happening, even women and children, and a baby. There's enough here for us to hazard a guess at what the artist is picturing: it's the Battle of Slim Buttes, the very first fight after Little Big Horn, 1876, this one in the far northwest corner of South Dakota. 

When I'm explaining all of this, trying to be the teacher I once was, some kid will invariably raise a hand. They're all around me, so I grab it and turn to listen. "Were Indians Nazis?" that kid will say, and they'll all go super-attentive.

One of the tipis is decorated with what looks to be an inverted swastika. The "inverted" part they don't get, but what kids, little kids, can't seem to look past is the symbol on tipi the upper left. This is what never fails to grab their attention. 

No, the Lakota were not Nazis, I tell them. What looks like a swastika is really just a symbol of lots of good things--of the joy of changing seasons, of life and love and new babies, of all kinds of blessings. 

I don't know that my answer gets anywhere. The swastika, backward as it may be, sweeps them right off the Plains.  

The swastika--not the Lakota blessings wish--is making a comeback these days, being dragged out of the closet to make shadowy appearances at raucous gatherings to blame Jews for all our problems. Hitler took a perfectly good symbol of good fortune, tipped it slightly, flipped it to be right-facing, and, close to a century later, darling, little fourth-graders still chill when they see one, even if the one they spot is painted on a Lakota tipi and vastly older than the Third Reich or America, for that matter.

And I've got one. I haven't a clue where it came from, honestly. My dad, a WWII vet, spent his service years on a tug in the South Pacific and never came anywhere near Normandy or the Bulge, never saw a German. Dad's gone, and his son is left with the thing. Here it lies, still somehow pulsing hate.

So tell me this. What am I to do with it? 

Do I go online and sell it? I'm sure there's a market for such things, maybe now especially. Even though, right now, I bet I could get top dollar for hate, I'd rather not deal in damnation. 

It has no provenance really, other than the Third Reich. I have no idea where it came from. I can't say some long-gone uncle of mine found it as he followed the front from Normandy to Berlin. I don't know of any relatives that fit that scenario. None of my relatives lived in the Netherlands during the war years.

It doesn't tell a story, other than the big one. I'm guessing I could give it to the museum, but the truth is, they already aren't altogether sure of what to do with the Nazi flotsam and jetsam they already have.

I could simply step outside the burn it, get rid of it with last summer's dead grass, make a ceremony out of it, a private thing. Tell no one, just get rid of it. 

If I'm rid of it, I don't have to think about it, and something in me, something I inherited from Diet Eman and Elie Weisel and a score of others from the literature of the Holocaust: and that is simply "Don't forget."