Provenance v

It takes all of nine hours to get to Emo. If there were shortcuts, we didn't know 'em and didn't take 'em. We taught what classes we could before leaving, and figured we'd be there about nine. When we pulled into town, we turned right at the church sign, wondering if anyone would be around after the visitation. It was late, but there were lights and cars.

We had motel reservations, but the cars prompted us to park alongside somewhere and walk into the church--which we did. It was late. The only folks around were family. The coffin--handmade by the boys--was still open.

"We waited to shut it because we knew you were coming," one of the Veldhuisen boys told us. We hadn't raced, hadn't even calculated making it in time for the visitation. We were surprised, shocked even, that our arrival was so specially anticipated. They'd waited to close the cover of the coffin until we would arrive. A significant moment in the entire ritual of mother's dying was put off just so we could "pay our respects." And we did. There she was, same long hair, same patient smile.

I don't know that in my life I ever felt quite so privileged. They'd waited for us to arrive before they shut the coffin. We had no idea. 

We stayed around, talking. It was a big family, and somewhere amid those conversations, I remember saying to one of the Veldhuisen girls--they were women then, of course, and mothers themselves--I couldn't help saying what was on my mind right then, that in my life Nick and Johanna Veldhuisen were firmly implanted pillars of virtue (I didn't use that language, I'm sure). I told her that a weekend retreat long, long ago, staying at their house, was, in a way, life-changing. 

She smiled. I told her I remembered Dad ladling out breakfast porridge, sitting down at a breakfast table with twenty people, saying little, just smiling and praying. 

"Well, he could be stubborn, you know," she said, the confession of a daughter, not just some carpetbagging writer there for a weekend. 

I didn't want to believe it. "You're serious?" I said. "About what kinds of things?"

"Like music," she told me. "Like what we sing in church."

I couldn't believe it, didn't want to. "Orthodox, schismatic, Dutch, rural, staunch, and dour: the Christian Reformed stereotype lacks freedom and joy," Stanley Wiersma claimed in a blurb on the back cover of the Family Portrat book. He admired the stories I'd written, he said, because they "shattered the stereotype permanently."

I didn't want Nick Veldhuisen to be something neither Stanley Wiersma or I wanted him to be.

"For instance?" I said.

She told me about disagreements, fights, in fact, the girls, who sang duets and trios in church, would have with their father about what music was fitting for worship. Nick Veldhuisen was old school; his daughters were not. They'd argued hard, she told me, to be able to sing some songs they'd loved, "like 'In Christ Alone,'" she told me. Her Dad had to be convinced that nothing unseemly was being sneaked into worship by way of all that contemporary stuff. 

"And?"

"And he was. We'll sing it tomorrow, at Mom's funeral."

He let it go, even for his precious wife's funeral.

Twice last Sunday, I sang that contemporary piece, once at our church, once at a Reformation Day service at another, not lustily either, but thoughtfully--"In Christ Alone," a contemporary hymn approved even by Mr. Nick Veldhuizen and sung, memorably, at his blessed wife's funeral the next day.

Ever since Johanna Veldhuisen's funeral, that whole story spreads out across whatever sanctuary I'm in when we sing "In Christ Alone"--Mother at the clothesline, the innards of the cow, the bears in the bush, that heavy wire drawn tight over the pews of the old church, mixed-gender soccer, a dance, that gorgeous lake down the road, more than a few Veldhuisen kids in Iowa, breakfast porridge and brown sugar, even "rural, staunch, and dire." 

Sometimes I envy the Roman Catholics. They've got the saints, after all. The Reformation--Calvin, Luther--wanted no part of that, and neither would Nick and Johanna, had they had the option. It's impossible to imagine that either of them would have allowed me to call them "saints." 

I'll honor that. Nick could be stubborn, "staunch and dire." 

We are what we are finally, irrepressibly human; but somewhere in each of our souls is a presence that's almost impossible to define. And it's there in Emo, and here in Siouxland, and wherever two or three are gathered. It's in all of us, hard as that is to believe or maintain. It's called "the image of God."

And it's own blessed way, that image alone makes us saints.