Easter Sunday morn

Grote Kerk, Dortrecht

In effect, had Flanner O'Connor been asked, she might well have said that first and foremost, she was a Southern writer. She was, in origin, from somewhere far beneath the Mason/Dixon, Milledgeville, Georgia, heart of Dixie. She most certainly would turn on a dime if you chose to place her anywhere else.

But just as consequential to her stories as her being from Georgia, as her being a real Southern woman, was her faith, her Roman Catholic faith specifically, as her stories openly confess. She was a Christian writer, although I'm not entirely sure she would have appreciated that particular distinction. More than anything else bound and printed, her stories convinced me that Christian writers need write for more than a flannelgraph. 

For example, this Easter morning, consider the very famous and much-loved story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The woman at the heart of things considers herself highly moral in all walks of her life. She graciously accepts thinking of herself as a woman of high bearing--she's not just trash, after all. 

When she and her family get lost and suffer an accident, the men who stop to investigate are murderous thugs on the run, which the family slowly and dimly comes to understand. 

When the veil drops, Grandma blurts out her discovery, which, sadly--O'Connor was not in the least shy about violence--leads to them, all of them, dying. As they do--the gun shots ring off-stage--Grandma continues to talk to the Misfit, suggesting that she knows where all of this is going. She tells him, time and time again, to pray.

He lets out his life story to her, which wasn't rosy, explains how it was that he was in prison--and not unjustly. "They had the the papers on me," he says. When she preaches, he claims he doesn't need Jesus for anything because he's found he can go it alone and make it.

Two more shots ring out. Grandma is frantic, continues to say that she knows he's a good man,  which, of course, he isn't and is willing openly, even proudly, to admit. Then O'Connor has the Misfit give this twisted, chilling testimony:

Jesus was the only one that ever raised the dead. . .and he shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off-balance. If he did what he said, then there's nothing to do but throw away everything, and if he didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got by doing the best you can by killing somebody or burning down a house or doing some other meanness to him.

That twisted testimony is half wrong, of course: rejecting the cross and/or the open grave this Easter morning doesn't make him or anybody else a  mass killer. 

But what he's right about is the assertion that everything in life depends on faith, the sturdy belief somewhere along the line if Jesus did what he said, there's nothing to do but live by and in that faith. 

It's Easter, no more consequential day in the life of the church and each of its believers--not only that, but in life itself. 

This morning, I couldn't help remembering that the Misfit kills Grandma, removes his glasses, and  admits to his bloody sidekick that there warn't no fun in killing the old lady. 

It's a story rich in meaning. O'Connor loved telling her audiences that grace is that mysterious, that when the old lady touched him it was itself the touch of grace.

"If he did what he said, then there's nothing to do but throw away everything."

On this Easter morning the Misfit's line, hard as it is to follow, is no less true, is it? 

De Smet in Iowa ii

A Rudolph Kurtz sketch

Father De Smet began the ministry he'd long ago dreamed of when some of those refugee Pottawatomie asked for their very own Blackrobe, someone to come and minister to them and bring the white man's medicine. Not far away, a recently planted mission among the Kickapoo, who'd also originated in the Great Lakes region, went belly up when the Kickapoo simply walked away from the reservation system. 

With the angry Kickapoo gone and the newly arrived Pottawatomie begging, the choice was simple. De Smet went up river to Council Bluffs to begin "to bring Christ to the heathen" in an effort to accomplish the dream of establishing a very distinct Christian community among Indigenous all around. He boarded a river boat in St. Louis and started the trek up to a place in the river not far from the grave of chief Blackbird, a place where not many years later a small prairie town named Omaha would arise.

A veteran traveler, he had crossed the Atlantic three times, but was not unaware of the problems steam ships had with the Missouri. "I would rather cross the ocean than ascend the Missouri River," he wrote. "The current is so swift that in order to get up the river the boat must be heavily loaded and the steam at full pressure." And that's not all  "We run upon sand bars every day." And then there's always those felled trees. "The river bristles with snags which tear a boat open." The average life of a Missouri River steam boat was three years.

There was a crowd to greet him at the moment his arrival. He was thrilled, but soon realized that the gathering was not for him but for a something far more precious than anything De Smet might deliver, something stored in the hold of the ship, something of even greater value--whiskey. 

Often, of course, people came to him with their medical problems since it was understood even before he'd arrived that this white man, like all Blackrobes, had a very special "medicine," new treatments for their bloody noses, feinting hearts, and traversed souls, and a book, a miracle cure-all, the white man's medicine.

There were some successes. Often, when Pottawatomie parents would come to him with a sick child, he would take care to help with those physical needs while dispensing spiritual strength on the sly. "When I find a child in danger whose parents are ill-disposed toward religion, I take out my bottles and recommend certain medicines," some of which he administered surreptitiously. "I begin by rubbing the child with camphor; then taking water, I baptize it before their unsuspecting eyes, and thus open heaven to the innocent souls."

But that other white-man's medicine had far more influence on the tribal people than the word he'd brought--whiskey, supposedly contraband, but, in truth, always available somehow by white men seeking to make their fortunes by offering hard drink for thirsty souls. The German artist Rudolph Kurz traveled up the Missourisketching the Native people throughout his travels. "The worst Indians I have seen in my travels," he wrote in his diary, "are the white people who live on the borders."

The Pottawatomie, far from home and now within the fledgling reservation system had reason to be miserable, but taking to whiskey the way they did made life even more miserable among them, even to the Blackrobes, who found them, at least initially, "gentle and peaceful." There was, among them, no "rank or privilege," De Smet told his friends by letter, and the chief was paid no salary whatsoever, maintained his position by way of his weapons, his bravery and courage. "His horse is his throne."

But when they were drinking, De Smet told the Father General, "all the good qualities of the Indian disappear." What's left is barely human, he might have said. "He no longer resembles man; one must flee from him."

Where there was money to be made, the white man was there; and thus, even though trade in liquor was expressly forbidden by the law, every last steamer  up river had it's own snoot full, often obscured. Liquor was a constant, and its effects on every phrase of life among the Pottawatomie was, in many moments, horrifying. 

And then there were the Sioux, marauders who swept down south of their homeland for horses, or for any number of reasons, and took what they wanted, leaving the Pottawatomie bleeding and grieving. 

The problem of raiding Yankton somehow appeared to Father De Smet as something he could do something about. Frequent letters to government officials, complaining about the whiskey appeared to go unanswered. Despite his protestations among the people, everyone drank whiskey and most of those who did drank far, far more than they should have. 

But these flagrant attacks from the north, from the Yankton Sioux, that was something, this young, squarely-built Flemish priest, an immigrant, somehow decided, he needed to end. 

De Smet in Iowa

It's easy to call it a case of the blind leading the blind. Seriously, the only way to understand what little good Roman Catholic missionaries (virtually all of them fresh off the boat) could do among the Potawatomi (barely at home--just three years!--in Iowa, having been routed from their Great Lakes homelands), the only  way to understand it was the cartoon nuttiness of those first missionaries, the nuttiness of blind faith.

Even the most beloved of the servants, even Father De Smet, who ran away from his Flemish home in Belgium, even the blessed Father, hadn't a clue about the people he was called to serve right there on the east side of the Missouri River in a  country that was still to him a vast undiscovered frontier. Literally, the whole bunch--red and white--were struggling strangers in a strange land, but De Smet and his crew were different--they had a mission.

Two Black Robes, dedicated to purpose, wandered west from what is today Omaha and moved into that sea of grass that was, back then, the Great Plains. Why?--in search of what, no one remembers. They wandered off west and soon enough became dreadfully lost. The plains they'd walked into was, in fact, a "sea of grass." An occasional river valley transgressed the plainness all around, so what was out there seemed unbounded, the horizon itself an illusion, a garden without end. Turn around sometime and there's nothing but more in every direction. It's very much feeling absolutely directionless on water. It's horrible.

But say you had a drone back then, with a video camera, and say you put it up high in the sky to record the movements of those two priests lost in the grass. What you'd see is a cartoon--two men in long black robes irretrievable, lost in that ocean of grass. 

For five or six days, or so, the story goes, two emissaries of the cross were completely lost, nowhere to go, thrashing around on an ocean that had no shores. 

Now speed up the video, and watch those two Black Robes circle around and  around and around, lost in space and time. Speed it up and try not to giggle. The two of them are real people, and they are irretrievably lost in a world where there is literally nothing around them.

Now populate that grassland with a thousand wayfaring immigrants who honestly don't have a clue where they are. What they know is that they were promised a place out west somewhere, out of the way of the blood they'd left in unending war back east. The Potawatomie, at least this branch of them, were walked--on a highway of death--to a place on the Missouri River the white man's government assigned them. There was a treaty, in 1833 there was a treaty in Chicago. That's what they knew. 

What did they know about a place called "Council Bluffs"? Nothing. They were Great Lakes people who, out there alone on a sea of grass, couldn't be farther from home. They were pushed away and forgotten, left to rot, with nothing to do. 

That's where Father De Smet, a young man from a small Flemish town he'd left, was assigned to bring the heathen to Christ. It's nutty. It's an absolutely crazy story of a man and a people who could not possibly be so unequally matched.   

It's a story about failure and faith. 

The Ronna deal

Some might well have agreed with NBC news management. Hiring Ronna McDaniel, the recently felled chair of the Republican Party, would be a good move for the network, lending some balance to their lib-leaning programming. Bringing a Republican ringer in would have steered the course of the whole gang in a more conservative direction, "righting" the course, you might say.

That Ms. McDaniel, who had deliberately erased her family name, Romney, in a move to point out her intra-party loyalties, was obviously talented enough to hold her own behind a microphone.  MSNBC wanted to invite a broader audience to its news programming.

Then, the shit it the fan. Don't know if you saw it or not but on Meet the Press, ye oldest TV program on the air, Chuck Todd, blasted NBC management for that decision, apologizing to moderator Kristin Welker, for having to do what she just had done, interviewing Ronna McDaniel, an interview that was set up before McDaniel had been hired by the network.

Then, Monday morning, the Morning Joe principles went ballistic about it too. NBC News upper management faced a full-fledged revolt. Everybody went hostile, at least most all of NBC's on-air stars.

Yesterday, management reversed field and broke off whatever handshake existed between the network and Ms. McDaniel. So much for the uprising. The stars won the day.

I haven't checked but I'm guessing Laura Ingram and her ilk will point at the whole mess and giggle about "lib censorship" scribbling it on every last post-it in the office. "So much for 'balance' among the lefties--they throw a conservative under the bus." You know how that goes.

But if I were Chuck Todd, I'd have come out swinging at management too--not because Ronna McDaniel was the kind of conservative voice MSNBC's gang of libs couldn't stand, but because she was MAGA's co-chair. She sold the "stop the steal" madness as wholesale as anyone. She simply repeated Trump's lies. Hers was among the strongest voices claiming MSNBC was "fake news." She was no friend of the network, nor any of its principles.

As Todd maintained on Meet the Press Sunday morning, how could viewers trust the commentary of anyone who'd climbed on the "Stop the Steal" bandwagon? When, on Sunday morning, she was asked about her appraisal of the 2020 election she said something to the effect of this sort of thing: in her position as Party Chair, she really had to play with the team. For the record, on Sunday morning, she said Biden won the 2020 election. 

That turn of mind is what's ailing this country. Trump is one thing, but when Republican stalwarts like John Thune and Randy Feenstra take one for the team and say nothing at all about Trump's silly "American Bible," that's why we're in the pickle we are as a nation.

Chuck Todd was right. Why should anyone believe Ronna McDonald on Sunday morning, when she says, in truth, there was no rigged election? She'd sung a wholly different song just a week or so ago when she was a soloist in Trump's choir. 

I can't help but believe that maybe someday people will look back on the days of Trump and point at "Stop the Steal" as the lie it was right from the beginning, and how that outright lie steamrolled through the American electorate and created the ills suffered thereafter--for how many years is yet to be determined. 

"He who sups with the Devil best use a long spoon."

Pep

Look, you got to hand it to him. He's my age, for pity sake; in fact, he's two years older. He's about my size too, and he eats like he's 17. He travels over the country, as if Vegas and Mara Lago are twin cities. He has his own plane or two--that helps: he doesn't get stuck in lines waiting to be searched. The man has more get-up-n-go than anybody I know my age. My mother, who liked him, would say he's a man with a whole lot of pep. 

Some days he wins, some day no, but there's not a day on his calendar when he doesn't create a fresh ink spill, or achieve it anyway by way of the cat-scratching mob. A little scandal, well-handled, goes a long ways to keep him in the news. So why not give them something to talk about?

"Remind me--what's the President's name again?--I mean the guy who's running against Trump?"

So it goes. Today too. He's makes the Ever-ready Bunny look housebound. 

According to the website Just Security, he's got two hot buttons today. 

Monday, March 25, 2024

• NY Election Interference: (1) Hearing in courtroom 59 at 10 AM on (a) Trump pending motion to dismiss, in the alternative preclude witness testimony, and adjourn based on discovery violations (to last at least one day), and (b) the scheduling of a trial date, if one is necessary; and (2) DANY to finalize trial exhibit designations 
• NY Civil Fraud Trial: Last day for Trump to post a bond of approximately 120% of Justice Engoron’s final monetary judgment, to stay that judgment pending appeal 

The first one alone would have sacked any other candidate for President in the history, but the last one is can of fireworks. In all likelihood, he'll come up with a buzzer-beater. He's going to tell his admiring throng that he really has no money? Nonsense. Then again, a punch-drunk Trump has used pity to grab dollars for years: "I am your retribution."

And now, today, let's see what's on the calendar of a man two years younger:

• Garbage out.

Yessiree, that's it. 

I'm saying, you got to hand it to him. He's a man of boundless energies and limitless strengths, a man capable of lying his way through every last 24-hour chunk of his life and, at four in the morning, going on Truth Social and ripping off some guy's nose. Yup, pep. 

He's the Republican party. . .end of sentence. I was going to write "he's the Presidential candidate of the Republican party," but there's no "of's" here. He is the Republican Party and he is running for re-election under a red sea of MAGA baseball caps.

Seriously, he is amazing and far, far more likely to crash-and-burn someday than his aged and sometimes creaky opponent. 

Oh, yeah, one more thing. He's plain-and-simple nuts. He's unable to control himself. Just this weekend he told whoever was listening that he has 500 million in cash. His lawyers, just a day or two earlier, said, under oath, that he didn't. 

Have no fear. Gird up your loins because Donald will find a way out, and when he does, some evangelical preacher with a on-line church and a hot podcast will announce to his thousands of parishioners, once more, that the fact that the man just keeps going is proof he's not 'of this world'--he's the MAGA Christ. 

It'll happen because it already has, more than once.

Grab the popcorn, take a seat, and get ready for today's show. Well, be sure to take the garbage out. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; . . . 

I first heard the line years ago from my wife’s grandmother, who I knew only for a few years as a rather elegant woman with a radiant crown of silver hair.  I don’t remember the occasion, but I’ll never forget the comment because it seemed so out of character for a fine old Christian matriarch.  “When bad things happen,” she said, eyes almost averted, her head shaking slightly, “they always come in threes.”

I had no clue where she got that idea, nor why she believed it.  Grandma Visser, whose people were hearty Calvinists for generations, could not have pointed anywhere in scripture for that idea, as she well could have for most of her foundational beliefs.  But this ancient bit of folklore—does it have pagan roots?—never fully left her psyche, even though she probably read the Word of God every day of her life.  “Bad things happen in threes.”  She wasn’t—isn’t—the only one to say it or believe it.  Google it sometime.

 Can it be true?  I don’t know that anyone could do the research.  But it must have seemed a valid perception for generations of human beings caught in the kind of downward spiral that David must have been in when writing Psalm 42.  And, as we all must sadly admit, often as not perception creates its own realities.

Is it a silly?  Sure.  If we expect it to be true, we may be silly.  But the sheer age of that odd idea argues for some ageless relevance.  Whether or not it’s true isn’t as important perhaps as the fact its sentiment has offered comfort and strength to human sorrowers. 

 True believers expect something more than they’ve already gone through, some additional misery if they have already got stung twice.  By repeating the old line, Grandma was steeling herself for the next sadness, anticipating that three would mean the end of sorrows, at least for a while.

 My guess is that the ancient folk wisdom finds a place in the human psyche not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting:  it brings order to chaos. Sad to say, there are three, but at least that’s it.

Interesting, I think, that Eugene Peterson uses the word chaos in his version of this verse:  “chaos calls to chaos,” he says.  And he’s just as right as anyone, I suppose, for it’s impossible to claim biblical inerrancy when it comes to a verse like this. The KJV says “waterspouts” where the NIV says “waterfalls,” wholly different phenomena.  The fact is, nobody really knows what specifically is meant by “deep calls to deep.”

 And yet everyone who’s faced a march of consecutive sadnesses knows very well.  “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions,” Shakespeare says in Hamlet, an even more depressing assessment than Grandma Visser’s.

We really don’t know what David means here, but many readers of Psalm 42 somehow get it. Our lives on occasion feel like Thomas Hardy novels, when things simply seem to get worse and worse and worse, and don’t get better.

There are no vivid pictures embedded in the line “deep calls to deep,” but that doesn’t mean there isn’t meaning enough for most of us to find ourselves therein.

We can’t avoid the painful reality of the soul that’s sliced opened to us in Psalm 42:  the singer who believes in the Light but sees nothing but darkness around him.

And maybe, thankfully, what’s there is the outline of a third bad thing

Morning Thanks--an old friend

People who love Wendell Berry--and they are legion--don't read him for his masterful plots. Often as not, Berry's love is only secondarily for what happens in a story; his love is making characters live. When he's good, and he's always good in my book, what he adds to your library (and your world!) is real live human beings, each of whom are worth knowing. In his novels, you discover their marvelous humanity. 

That "marvelous humanity" is in short supply it seems, so stumbling on a Wendell Berry novel means stumbling on characters who, through thick and thin, in some perfectly fallen way, show you truly rich--that very "image of God" that Berry would say dwells in us all. Few writers create such characters--another, by the way, is Marilyn Robinson.

For me, reading Jayber Crow was a long-standing obligation. I'd promised, long ago, to read it, when a friend told me he thought Jayber Crow was the very best book he'd ever read--and that man, Terry Vanden Berg, was a librarian. His praise overflowed with religious conviction. Jayber Crow was simply overwhelmingly good--"You have to read it--you'll love it."

Those weren't his last words by any means, but they were, if I'm not mistaken, his last words to me. He died on the street, when a heart attack took him long before it might have. He was out jogging.  It may well be that his untimely death makes me think his great reverence for Jayber Crow were Terry's last words to me.

No matter. It took me a quarter of a century to read the book this librarian told me was the very best novel he'd ever written. No piece of fiction could possibly live up to that kind of billing. We all suffer similarly: someone says, "you HAVE TO see" a movie; so you do, and you can't help thinking it didn't rate that kind of praise.

But then, to say I expected more glory from Jayber Crow is off the mark too. It's a fine book, a beautiful book, by all means worth reading. But the fact of the matter is, I enjoyed Hannah Coulter more. It's hard to decipher why, I suppose, and maybe I should simply say there's no accounting for taste.

But let me wander into this a bit. Jayber Crow tests the limits of what I might call "presentational theater," of listening to a chorus or an observor or a stage manager guide you through a story. The undeniable beauty of Jayber Crow is Jayber Crow, the man, in large part because he possesses what I'd call heavenly wisdom. He is an orphan, someone educated by his own passion for ideas and books, a kind of stranger in the world, a man whose lifeblood appears to flow only when in the presence of a woman who is unequally yoked. Jayber Crow spends most of his adult life quietly and passionately in love with a woman already married. The novel's surprise resolution is perfectly sad, which is to say, perfectly beautiful. I liked the novel greatly, but I loved Hannah Coulter.  

After a fashion, the novels are brother and sister. They all grow up around a small community fictionalized as Port William, Kentucky, a very small town surrounded by the kind of blessed countryside where a fully-fledged agrarian like Wendell Berry can grow. If you've never read Wendell Berry, it may be difficult to believe that he actually builds a community, but that's what he does--and in a series of novels all titled by characters' names. 

Berry loves flourishing community, and therefore loves the people who create it--people like Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow, as well as the men, women, and children around them. His concerns are with the soul really, the human soul, and his conviction is that men and women who live in community have separate lives that can, in that community, truly flourish. He doesn't write cartoons; his characters fall into deep valleys and wander into dark shadows, but finally their lives are rich. They flourish. 

Terry Vanden Berg couldn't have been wrong--Jayber Crow was the best novel he ever read. It was right up there for me. I can sing its praises, just not as convincingly as he did.

Once upon a time, sitting in a dorm lounge at Dordt College, Terry was reading over a paper of mine. I was a freshman. I'm quite sure I'd asked him to proof. He was an English major, two years my elder. He likely drew out a red pen. "Not knew here--you have to say knows. All the way through, you've got to correct your verb tense," he told me. "Always remember, when you write about a story or a poem, 'literature lives'--it's present tense, always present tense. Literature lives."

That's what he told me, years earlier, when I needed to understand what I was myself feeling--somehow literature lives. Always present tense. 

That too I've never forgotten. 

This morning's thanks are for a librarian and a reader, a man named Terry Vander Berg. 

______________________

Here's a fine 10-minute talk on Jayber Crow by Russell Moore.  

City Champs!

So I just so happened to sit on a steel chair set up directly beneath the basket on the north end of the court last week at church (we're worshipping in a school gym temporarily), and I couldn't help thinking that that rim looked twenty feet off the earth--waaay up there.

I hadn't really looked at a basketball rim from beneath it for a long, long time, and it just seemed impossible that one night at a gym in Orange City, Iowa, during warm up layups, on the court of our rivals who we all knew would beat us, I was somehow hyped enough to get up and over that rim and actually stuff the basketball. (I doubt such an event myself, but don't smudge a dream.)

There I sat beneath the bucket, thick black bands up around my left calf to keep a brace in place beneath my left foot, a limb which no longer appears to cooperate when my body asks it to. I don't walk well, not well at all, although the brace keeps  my limp from being advertised. It doesn't help that I couldn't really imagine myself shooting a basketball or rebounding or moving downcourt on a fast break--no matter, that rim seemed impossible.

I spent years playing ball, stopped slo-pitch when I was almost sixty, even though at that age I likely slammed more big fat pitches out of the park than any of my teammates. It just was time. 

Two days ago, I walked into the indoor athletic field at Northwestern, on my way to a workout designed for this new condition of mine, and watched as a softball coach hit grounders to a couple of infielders. The sound of the bat on the ball sounds nothing at all like it did years ago, but I stopped, stood and watched, wishing, just wishing that the coach would see the old bald guy with the brace and offer me the bat. I'd have given anything for fifteen minutes hitting grounders.

It would be impossible for me to tally the hours I spent on a basketball court. Add in a baseball diamond, and we're talking about most of my life. 

All of that and more, and then a sweet ex-student sends me the picture up top from my teaching days in Wisconsin. That's me in the sweaty Calvin College shirt--and no, I didn't go there. I remember the team that won the Monroe (WI) City Basketball League Championship that year, 1971, I think. We were a tough bunch, that square man in the middle knew how to muscle the ball into the basket. He wasn't quick, wasn't graceful, but get the ball into him in the pain and he bulled in to score.

For a long time I had a little individual trophy--we must have each got one. I think it's gone now, tossed finally in one of our attempts to slim down, and I remember the picture too well. It was in the Monroe Times, a daily, and I loved it being there, not necessarily because I was so proud of our win but because--I can hardly believe I'm admitting this--because I hoped that some Calvin grad would see it, someone of the tribe I knew as my people would recognize the peculiar name of the college--and call me, just someone who knew the name Kuyper.

I love remembering those two years in Wisconsin, loved it because I loved my students, one of whom sent me that picture when she saw it in a display at a birthday party for the guy who'd get ball in the paint and somehow muscle it in. This party was, of course, at a bar--it's Wisconsin after all. A recent college graduate, someone who left the fold angrily in fact, I had a lot to learn.

When I remember back to that time today, I remember the students--it's hard for me to have to admit that they're all, long ago retired at this time, just as balding and paunchy as their four-years older teacher. But I also remember the loneliness, stark and painful loneliness that I felt, something of an alien.

It's painful even remembering that, but honestly what I remember about that picture just now sent to me from one of those students from long ago, is wondering if maybe some Calvin grad in Green County, Iowa, would look at it and pull out a phone book. 

It's not that I had no friends. Besides, kids really adored me--they still write. But what I remember, what I can't quite forget, is loneliness. Sometimes things looked, even back then, as if they were somehow far out of reach. 

Songs and Stories from the Falls

Henry James once said of the English novelist Anthony Trollope that "His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual." 

That's the kind of fine line that makes you sit back and spin through it again. Whether James is right or not is a judgment I'm not qualified to make, but I can't help feeling what James might be talking about shows up in a passage Trollope penned about "the falls," the only ones that matter really, the Niagara Falls. 

Now, don't be mistaken--Niagara Falls is in no wise "usual." Its three separate falls span the border between Ontario, Canada, and New York state, and empty the Niagara River at a rate of almost six million cubic gallons of water every minute. Nothing about the Niagara Falls is "usual." Some claim that kind of immensity pounding into the Niagara Gorge can be heard as far as forty miles away. 

Here's what Trollope, this master of the usual, said about the Falls:

…To realize Niagara you must sit there till you see nothing else than that which you have come to see. You will hear nothing else and see nothing else. At length you will be at one with the tumbling river before you. You will find yourself among the waters as though you belong to them.

Then there's the water's sheer divinity:

The cool liquid green will run through your veins and the voice of the cataract will be the expression of your own heart. You will fall as the bright waters fall, rushing down into your new world with no hesitation and with no dismay: 

Oh, yes, and here's the spirit too:  "and you will rise again as the spray rises, bright, beautiful and pure. Then you will flow away in your course to the uncompassed, distant and eternal ocean…"

Phew. But then, I'm sure Niagara Falls (where the three are one) prompts every mortal soul who takes the time to sit and stare at its eternity of water, then rise into some timeless transcendence, not a particularly difficult thing to do, by the way.

A boat tour at the Falls uses an ancient myth to advertise, goes by the name of "The  Maid of the Mist."  The almost ageless story belonged originally to the Haudenosaunees, a local Native people who long claimed one of their own, a young woman suddenly widowed, depressed and lonely, took it upon herself to push her canoe into the Niagara River and willfully plunge over the falls to her death. 

Once she heard the roar of the falls, she prayed to her god to make her death easy, or so the story goes, and he did more than that: he saved her, even married her off to one of his handsome sons. Don't know if Trollope heard this one when he was at the Falls, although if he did, he may well have been even more ecstatic. 

One more chapter. The lovely maiden, now a wife, amid the pounding somehow hears the anguish of her people back up top the falls, then gets permission to visit them and warn them, which she does successfully, thereby becoming a savior of her people, "the Maiden of the Mist." 

But then, how about this one? Harriet Tubman, who almost single-handedly saved as many as seventy enslaved people, many of them by way of the Underground Railroad, used to bring the newly freed over the vast and newly built suspension bridge, right there at Niagara Falls. She delivered the suddenly freed, including her parents, to St. Catharine's or Chatham, to Canada, where finally their shackles fell blessedly away. 

Josiah Bailey must have heard that immense roar of the falls as the train he was taking came up on the old Suspension Bridge. But, Tubman said, he wouldn't look up, kept his head in his hands, or so she wrote in a memoir.

Finally, when Tubman knew they'd passed the halfway point on the bridge, she shook him, grabbed his shoulders, and told him they'd made it--he was out, he was free. This man Josiah Bailey stood right then and there in the train, and started singing on that suspension bridge. 

“Glory to God and Jesus too,
One more soul is safe;
Oh, go and carry de news,
One more soul got safe.”

And didn't stop singing that song till he got off the train, even drew a crowd of admirers while he sang, Tubman said.

Anthony Trollope first visited America in the early 1850s, and stayed only for a short time to visit his mother, who'd moved to America sometime earlier. So it's unlikely but not impossible that Trollope was here in 1856 when Harriet Tubman brought Josiah Bailey into freedom, which means you can't help but wonder what more Trollope might have said or how he would have said what he did, if he knew that right above him on that newly constructed suspension bridge, four slaves from Virginia were being brought into freedom. I wonder what this "master of the ordinary" might have added to what he had written had he heard Josiah Bailey's song amid the tumult and the roar, because it's amazing, isn't it?--how music stays in the soul?

Just a little bit of Buechner

Frederick Buechner is someone whose work I wish I'd met long, long ago. For years, I've heard people I know and trust speak so very highly of him, you'd think he'd contributed to Word himself. Smart, funny, thoughtful, rich and wide in breadth, Buechner's reputation had soared in my mind even if I hadn't taken the time to read him. 

I have now, although not extensively. Barbara and I have used a book of meditations of his that was just wonderful. Somewhere behind me on the shelves, I've got, unread, Godrick, a novel, I think, and I read a little bit of him every day.

A friend of mine told me his laptop gets a shot of Fred Buechner every morning. Sounded like a great idea, so I signed up. 

This one came about a week ago.

A theologian I respect once said at a conference that I attended, a conference where she was a speaker, that no true Calvinist can say he or she hasn't flirted wildly with universalism. When I read this chunk of Frederick Buechner, I was reminded of that line and, smilingly, my own flirtations. 

Descent Into Hell

 

THERE IS AN OBSCURE PASSAGE in the First Letter of Peter where the old saint writes that after the crucifixion, Jesus went and preached to "the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey" (3:19-20), and it's not altogether clear just what spirits he had in mind. Later on, however, he is not obscure at all. "The gospel was preached even to the dead," he says, "that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God" (4:5-6).   "He descended into hell," is the way the Apostles' Creed puts it, of course. It has an almost blasphemous thud to it, sandwiched there between the muffled drums of "was crucified, dead, and buried" and the trumpet blast of "the third day he rose again from the dead." Christ of all people, in hell of all places! It strains the imagination to picture it, the Light of the World making his way through the terrible dark to save whatever ones he can. Yet in view of what he'd seen of the world during his last few days in the thick of it, maybe the transition wasn't as hard as you might think.   The fancifulness of the picture gives way to what seems, the more you turn it over in your mind, the inevitability of it. Of course that is where he would have gone. Of course that is what he would have done. Christ is always descending and redescending into hell.   "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden" is spoken to all, whatever they've done or left undone, whichever side of the grave their hell happens to be on.   -Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

DeSantis and the Death of WOKE

I'm more than a little shame-faced. I'm downright embarrassed, mortified even, at myself and myself alone because I fell for the guy's claptrap. 

One-time Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis blew all kinds of air into the trial balloon by questioning the righteousness of literature and social studies teachers throughout the nation, who he claimed were poisoning minds and souls by spoon-feeding the nation's youth unabashedly WOKE materials, by pushing LGBTQ at them, even "grooming" them for unspeakable things.

And that's not all. He went after librarians. That's right--librarians. It's not  easy to villainize the school librarian, or the peaceable staff downtown. I mean, you've got to go out of your way to make them out to be as depraved as DeSantis wanted to make you believe they were. But he did--and scored some significant results.

And the whole CRT thing, too, clear and present danger, an issue that grew out of some Southern swampy mess that established a clean and clear premise: there is no such thing as racial prejudice in America because here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we took care of all of that with the Civil War. I mean, look at Oprah. 

The monster was fed energetically by concerned parents who looked at their kids' education and found it riddled with ideas they thought way, way, way beyond the pale. It was as if the American public had simply assumed that teachers and librarians weren't lecherous, deranged libs. Doggone it, it was time for parents to take back the classroom and retool it with the values of, say, Donald J. Trump. America needed to arm itself with MAGA to kill off WOKE. Florida, De Santos claimed, was where WOKE went to die. 

And I fell for it. I did. I'm so sorry. I thought DeSantis' WOKE silliness worth fighting.

Nope. According to its own progenitor, the whole thing was a bit of a "false narrative." Not long ago, none other than DeSantis chided the Florida public for going too far with the whole book banning thing, told them to cool their jets, to let up a little because the whole thing was devolving into sheer madness. 

After all, some included the Bible on the list of objectionable books, and the dictionary. DeSantis says some of the objections schools and librarians face are an "abuse of the process" undertaken "to score political points."

Well, he should know.

And I believed the guy, when, dang it, it was all politics.

 Long live WOKE. May MAGA rest in peace. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

 

“My soul is downcast within me; 

therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, 

the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.”

 

 

For a decade at least, just about every Saturday morning I could, I ventured out west into the rolling hills that have formed, centuries ago, along the Big Sioux River, a place where the land opens broadly into a landscape that, like most of the Great Plains, ends only in what seems infinite space.  Literally, there is nothing there.  There’s corn and there’s beans and there’s some grasslands, but nothing is substantially present to fill the frame of a camera lens; and that’s why it’s such a challenge to try. I do what I can to get an angle on a subject that offers very little. We live in fly-over country here, but then I’m a fan or Thoreau: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” he once claimed,  “than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

 

Some time ago, the New York Times ran a story about Californians leaving the state for the Midwest. When I sent the story to friends, the Times website told me that story was their most-emailed piece that day. Amazing. 

 

And in some ways, terrific.  It would be nice for everyone here if some companies would relocate to the rural Midwest, where wages are dismal and, often, benefits are worse. We could use a financial shot in the arm.

 

But I’m not all that interested in a flood of new residents. I am blessed—I really am—by living in a place where open land is all around, just a farm or two per gravel road. These days, from my own backdoor I can see for miles. 

 

Some people in tall-grass prairie country lament the death of hunting, pheasant hunting specifically. The number of hunters is down, even though the headcount of pheasants, by my estimation, is up--at least I see more out here. Just scared up a half-dozen hens out back yesterday.

 

I’ve always thought Thoreau wasn’t wrong when he claimed that boys (his word) really ought to hunt when they’re young but give it up on becoming men, and that’s why I don’t lament the loss of hunters. But I’ve been one, and I still sometimes long to get out there in the silence. Just the same, I wanted to write a letter to the reporter suggesting that we’d all be better off—even the pheasants—if we all packed cameras instead of 12-gauge pumps.

 

Some Saturdays—lots of them this time of year--the sky, at dawn, is thick with clouds, so thick that I don’t bother going out. When I made a habit of it, cloudy Saturday mornings hurt because I came to need my Saturday morning’s hour-long pilgrimage into open spaces.  Kathleen Norris, in Dakota, makes clear what others have said—that sometimes where there’s nothing, there’s really something.

 

And I say all of this because in the second bout of sadness which David discusses in this psalm—and it’s interesting that 42 doesn’t end with verse six—he is a bit more specific in the means by which he’ll fight the blues. He’ll return—thoughtfully if not physically—to the open land, to the “heights of Hermon.” He’ll go back to the open spaces as an antidote to his weary, downcast soul, because there he can remember God.

 

Honestly, I think I know what he’s talking about. Just a week ago I was all by my blessed self in the snowy country just a few miles east of Glacier National Park. All by myself.  Oh, maybe a horse or gang of deer, but all by my blessed self, and it was a blessing.

 

Snow had just blew in from the far north, chilling everything and leaving an icy glaze over the entire world.  I should learn how better to adjust my camera’s f-stop. 

 

Just the heights of Hermon---the mere memory of standing there all alone, David says, gives life to a weary soul. 

 

I think I know that one.

An old story, "Anna"

Continued from yesterday. . .

Years have passed since then. Today the church pays a music director to order a Christmas show from some slick Christian catalog out of Texas, but Anna is still teaching Sunday school, and now she has my own three-year-old boy. No one else her age teaches, because kids have a way of forcing early retirements, just as they always did. But there is a smile on Anna's face whenever we drop our son off with her for Sunday school. It's a smile unlike anything we ever saw before on her face, a smile that surprised me at first. And Anna has a permanent now, her curly gray hair curled up tight around her head like any of a dozen other women in church.

Time fills in gaps the way dawn colors a lakeshore landscape. Some things I know now about Anna. I know now that Anna cared for her parents until the day each of them died. I know now that her father was no gentle man to live with-blustery, hardheaded, stubborn as the toughest Hollander. I know now that when he was gone, every Sunday she dressed her mother, set her in the wheelchair, and pushed the old woman to church, even when she knew her mother understood little of the sermon. I know now that giving her life to them was a thankless, blessed job that might have turned anyone's face into something grim, something less than radiant.

I know now that the woman who never married regularly plays grandmother to two little blond-haired boys no older than my own son, two little boys her niece was left alone with when their father ran off with another woman.

Why does she smile that way today, twenty years after a class of fourth-grade boys decided she was much too owly to be a good teacher? Why does my son love her today? Why does he curl around my leg and turn away from her when she talks to him, as if he's embarrassed to have all of her attention himself? Why does Anna smile?

Maybe it's because life is easier for her now, later on in her years. Maybe the privileged burden of her parents' care is there behind her, settled in the pages of her mind like yellowed photographs. Maybe the anxiety of being alone has settled into a firm assurance that all things have worked together for good. Maybe playing grandmother has swelled the limits of her tolerance. Maybe the smile is simply the inherent reward of many years of Christmas programs interspersed annually in a lifetime of quiet selflessness.

Four hundred years ago we reformed the church and stopped canonization, stopped making saints. Maybe it's a shame. Today we don't know how to revere those who give themselves, all of themselves, through us to God. We let them pass on too easily, and we don't elevate them like heroes. After all, what was Abraham to David but a symbol of belief and courage, of faith and promise.

So this is for you, Anna. And this is for me. And this is for our son. And this is for our Lord.

I'm happy you're out of intensive care, and so is my son.

*~*~*~*~*

There's a bit more to the story. When the piece appeared in a magazine I knew some people in the community was published, I hoped my masked name might keep it away from those who would know who this central character is. 

Nope.

A man who grew up not all that far from where I did, took a look, read a few words, and said, "Hey, he's talking about my aunt." That discovery got back to me, and more. No one seemed angry however, although if they had been angry or hurt, I may never have known.

Then, years later, when we were visiting the town where I grew up, the fictional Anna came up to me. I don't know that I had ever spoken to her before in my life. By this time, she was most certainly elderly. I will admit that I wondered what she was going to say, but when it came out, mid smiles, she told me she'd had the whole essay decoupaged and it hung in her bedroom.

I'm happy to say that it seemed to me that "Anna" was a winner.

An old story, "Anna"

If my son, here referred to as three years old, is today well into his forties, the story I'm telling is now more than forty years old, originally published in a magazine that, by my direction, gave the author a made-up name. Why? Because, back then, I was afraid of how the individuals might react, given my going public with their lives. It's a difficult line writers walk when writing stories which "use" characters and situations others might recognize, and I was aware of that with "Anna," because here those characters attended the same church I did. So I hid, or tried to.

But here's the story.

*~*~*~*~*~*  

Anna is out of intensive care now, and I guess that's why I'm saying this. Because it strikes me-now that she has wrestled through a fight with her heart-it strikes me that we are far too good at eulogies. Nice things are always easy to say after the funeral. But today Anna came out of intensive care.

Anna is an organist in our church--self-taught for the most part--and a Sunday school teacher for three or four generations probably. When I was a boy, we feared Anna because her grim face wore no emotion; her lips were locked together in a twist that was neither smile nor frown. We read it as perpetual disgust.

Sunday school programs brought out the worst in her. A hundred kids with lit fuses would shoot around the church sanctuary during practice the night before. "You fourth graders, act your age!"

She would always snap at us. We were sure she had no loving voice in her. When she'd tum to the fifth graders, someone would mimic her for sure. Years later I discovered that Anna created those annual programs.

Anna never married. In a church of families, even kids don't quite know how to take women who don't marry. They're different, and a boy starts recognizing such things about the same time he starts reading the script writing carved into the Communion table at the front of the church he's attended for ten years. Suddenly, it's just there. Fourth-grade boys just figured a woman like

Anna--sour Anna--couldn't get a man. Meanwhile, another Christmas program would come and go.

Halfway through adolescent rebellion, I thought Anna was an icon of the staid, traditional, immovable church of my youth. Fashions arrived and left, but Anna's hair looked forever the same, as if she'd surrendered to being out of time. I swore that the older she grew the slower she played organ, until even the bouncy hymns poked along like the old psalms. And always you'd see the expressionless face up there, lighted by the soft glow of organ light. She chewed gum, not vigorously but quickly, nervously, when she played.

______________________ 

More tomorrow  

The Tabor House, Tabor, Iowa

The John Tabor House

Religious visions were everywhere in the years preceding the Civil War. Boom towns out west here may have been hell holes for a time, but they were also peopled by starry-eyed believers who claimed their marching orders came from on high.

Tabor, Iowa, sits on a bluff far above the Missouri, the highest point of Fremont County. The place is not in terrific shape today; but Tabor has an epic past, created when fiery abolitionist Congregationalists set up camp here, just across the river from Nebraska. 

The Reverend John Todd House, in town, was a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, often a port of entry to runaway slaves who weren’t free until they could be protected from slave-holders and vigilante northerners looking to make a buck from substantial bounties. There was money to be made: slaves were property, after all.

In the 1850s, slavery was under attack, and Rev. Todd was a soldier in God’s army.
Truth is, he got into trouble before there even was a Tabor. A discussion about slavery aboard the steamer he came up on became heated. Once other passengers detected an abolitionist, they wanted his scalp. "Shoot him," someone yelled. "Kill him." One idiot told him if it was his choice, he’d straight-up trade the pastor for a mongrel dog and shoot the dog. Todd says he learned later that man was "a minister of the gospel from Missouri."

Both Iowa Congregationalists and Iowa Quakers thought the institution of slavery an abomination. What separated the two faith communities was a commitment to violence. The Quakers said no. Rev. John Todd and his Congregationalists said yes and became a prototype for an abolitionist preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

The manse of the Reverend John Todd sits right on the square in Tabor--don’t expect a palace. But the old house still has an tiny door leading down to a dank basement. John Todd was no more than a shim over five and a half feet tall, so what’s downstairs is more his size, a cave really, not inviting.

But if you stop by, don’t not go downstairs. At one point in time that basement was an armory full of guns for the war he thought about to begin in "Bleeding Kansas."

What's there today? Nothing. No cement floor, just dirt, a humming dehumidifier, random stones, bricks. That cellar was was never meant to be lived in. It was a place to hide when the prairie sky turned foreboding.

At the request of none other than fiery John Brown, who stayed right there in Tabor, Pastor Todd stocked his house full of guns because he simply could not abide the sin of slavery. Slaves, he and his friend John Brown claimed, had a more righteous reason for rebellion than did patriot colonists a century before.

In his own memoir of that era, Todd described himself and what happened this way:

The parson had one brass canon on his haymow, and another on wheels in his wagon shed. He had also boxes of clothing, boxes of ammunition, boxes of muskets, boxes of sabres, and twenty boxes of Sharps rifles stowed away in the cellar all winter.

The preacher took up arms. His eyes had seen the glory.

You'll have to get off the beaten track to find Tabor, and you’ll have to call ahead to to get in the house. Not many Americans stop there anymore, if they ever did.

But the basement still beckons, and the memory of that time and place and the war it begat somehow seems more real when you stand beneath ancient beams on a dirt floor, where once a preacher readied himself for a war that God meant to happen, a war to free the slaves.

The Man with the Branded Hand

The fact of the matter is, he was a favorite on a circuit of sorts, a circuit of American abolitionist audiences looking for more and more information about and inspiration for the cause. Abolitionists were not without a mission. The crusade they'd created when they signed on had a clear and righteous purpose--they advocated an end to slavery in these United States, and, many of them at least, meant the abolition of slavery to happen not next year or next month, but now.

Oh, my, were they hated. Southerners understood that what was at stake was their wherewithal. Loss of slaves meant loss of property, loss of economy, and loss of power, loss of a culture, loss of a way of life. In the early years of the 19th century, the battles over slavery were but a foretaste of what was to come after Fort Sumter.

But the righteous anger of the abolitionists could not be underestimated. Sometimes, slave-holders saw those dirty, rotten abolitionists wherever they looked, bound and determined to destroy their might and right. So they made laws that made them criminals, thieves when they clandestinely went after the property of slave-holders. 

Which only served to turn up the heat.  

Thus, a circuit of rostrums was created up north, where advocates for freedom would gather to hear people speak of the mission they shared so passionately. And that circuit included this particular man, Jonathan Walker, who became a favorite, not because of his oratorical skills--he was sadly wanting on that score--but because just a few minutes into his SRO presentations, he'd step off the podium and walk through the crowd, his hand open, because there on his palm stood, almost proudly, the scars from his branding--"SS" for slave stealer. 

The man with the branded hand had been a sailor since he was a kid in Massachusetts. In fact, he'd crafted his own ship, which explains why people called him "Captain Jonathan Walker," and, yes he did, he picked up slaves and brought them to freedom, sometime from Pensacola, Florida, where he and his family lived in the 1840s. It was quite simple: he'd be contacted by bondsmen, arrange a time to meet under the cover of darkness, and, this time at least, take passage to the Bahamas, where the good men and women he'd helped shook off the shackles that bound them, the whole bunch more than willing to risk their lives to escape the oppression of slavery. Walker picked them up and brought them to the Bahamas.

When he returned to Florida, he was badly infirm, a victim of sun stroke--it was not a big ship, more of a sloop than a ship. Since a number of slaves had been missing, he was accused of the theft, jailed, beat up, and then, of all things, branded by authorities--with the help of slave-owners--branded on the hand, the branding iron left in place for what seemed forever.

When finally Jonathan Walker recovered, his acclaim as a speaker rose like high seas on the abolitionist circuit, not because his rhetoric soared. By all reports, he wasn't much of a lecturer. What people remembered was those horrible scars on the man's hand, his branding, the "SS."

WELCOME home again, brave seaman! with thy thoughtful brow and gray,
And the old heroic spirit of our earlier, better day;
With that front of calm endurance, on whose steady nerve in vain
Pressed the iron of the prison, smote the fiery shafts of pain!

Or so wrote the Quaker abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, in a dedicatory poem to Jonathan Walker and his righteousness.

Is the tyrant's brand upon thee? Did the brutal cravens aim
To make God's truth thy falsehood, His holiest work thy shame?
When, all blood-quenched, from the torture the iron was withdrawn,
How laughed their evil angel the baffled fools to scorn!

Make no mistake, that branded hand was God's own to the abolitionists. Jonathan Walker had taken up the Lord's mission, after all. When Walker looked in the face of a slave, Whittier says he was looking into the face of Jesus, that very face, Whittier says, many "in blindness" miss entirely, even as they kneel "to a far-off Saviour." 

While the multitude in blindness to a far-off Saviour knelt
And spurned, the while, the temple where a present Saviour dwelt;
Thou beheld'st Him in the task-field, in the prison shadows dim,
And thy mercy to the bondman, it was mercy unto Him!

Upper-case H.

John Greenleaf Whittier's salutary poem "The Branded Hand" does the kind of work I'm sure he believed was the calling of the poet/prophet, immortalizing those sacred scars, making them sing forever.

Then lift that manly right-hand, bold ploughman of the wave!
Its branded palm shall prophesy, "Salvation to the Slave!"
Hold up its fire-wrought language, that whoso reads may feel
His heart swell strong within him, his sinews change to steel.

It had to have been an amazing time, religious people, Bibles in hand, going to war--literally and figuratively. Walker's time was even more divisive than ours. Just 16 years after the branding in Pensacola, there were Yankees and there were Rebs and there was blood all over the South, a death toll of 628,000, more than the combined deaths in every other war this nation has ever fought.

Just as so many others did, Jonathan Walker took his family west to Wisconsin for the Civil War years, then crossed the lake and ran a fruit orchard. He is buried in Muskegon, Michigan. 

For the rest of his life, he claimed the branded letters, "SS," meant "saved slaves." His body rests in a Quaker cemetery in Muskegon, Michigan. It is proudly marked.