Looking back at 2025

 

You can see, I'm sure, the problem. It's vanity, I know, but were I to walk around in public with these monster shoes holding up my horribly big feet, they could not only pass for boats, but for entire piers. Ugly?--absolutely, an admission of age too. I'm confident were we to take a hike through the nearest old folks home--there's one or two  plenty close, by the way--we'd find a dozens of these leviathans on rugs in front of TVs. Can you imagine some college kid wearing these? And remember, I'm confessing something here--I'd need size 16. Huge, not boats, battleships.

But I'm sick of shoes that don't fit, or, maybe it's better to say, shoes that make my feet ache. I've got no idea if these could bring some comfort, but they're marked to do just that, not to be impress any of the guests at the opera, but to keep down complaints from my feet.

And that's a nice thought. My feet haven't smiled for years, and their aching is not getting any better. That's why I'm shopping this morning of Old Years Eve--not because I'm lookin' for pizazz--I'm just after comfort.

Old Years Eve is an officially approved day to look back, even though, at my age, it seems that I look back far more frequently than ahead; there's more subject matter back there than there is out front. I can honestly say that I didn't think much about old age until I started wearing a knee brace a year and a half ago, assuming that if I did it would somehow miraculously stop my knees from caving for no good reason.

Turns out faulty knees were a symptom of what was happening neurologically throughout my body, a condition, when professionally assessed, led to a diagnosis of spinal stenosis, a condition I'd never heard of until it determined to go to war with my body. There's a walker right beside me here, and two canes hanging from a coat rack at the back door. I don't go anywhere without, at least, one of them, a cane or the walker. I'm a public service message for the cripples among us, and, if I can and will believe every doctor and/or specialist I've seen, I ain't getting over it anytime soon.

So, from the vantage point of this Old Years Eve, what's to assess that's behind me during the year of our Lord 2025 isn't a bowl of roses. Lord knows hundreds, thousands, millions of humanoids find themselves in far worse straits, so what right do I have to complain, right?

Be happy the wheelchair is in plastic storage in the garage, long abandoned. Be thankful for a half-dozen physical therapists who not only direct my body's recovery but must have been told sometime in their degree programs that the very best therapy they can deliver may well be telling the patient that he or she is doing great.

I don't care, I love it. "Yeah, well, Jim," they'll tell me, "you did well today, don't you think?"

For all those sweet PTs, I'm greatly thankful this December 31st. For the three PTs at Heartland Home, who had the toughest job; for the half-dozen or so at Orange City Hospital; and now for the three or four here at Pro-Edge, thanks so much for putting me through the paces and then telling me, even through my pouting pride, that I'm doing just fine. 

"Just fine" is just wonderful. 

St. MTG

She's just about come to the point where her name can be invoked simply by way of her initials--MTG. She's not quite risen to the level of a woman who would have been her nemesis--AOC, or the new czar of American health, RFK. She might have, had she not had what she considers a true Damascus Road experience, at least that's how she might well characterize it, or so says Robert Draper of the NY Times in a highly discussed and long feature article earlier this week.

The intent is to help an American public understand her, someone who was the captain of the cheerleaders for Donald Trump ever since she came on the scene. She was not only an advocate, she was an accomplice. Today, she's on his hit list and was heard on her phone, in public, berating her in the savage rhetoric he's known for. What happened?

The answer that Draper gives is fascinating in an eternal sense because Draper claims--via her testimony--that MTG met that Damascus Road experience during the commemoration of the life of Charley Kirk, yet another Trump champ and conservative hero, who was gunned down a few months ago.

Draper says MTG explained it this way. Mrs. Kirk stood up and said, among other things, that she forgave her husband's killer. She did so because it was the Christian thing to do--forgive one's enemies. Next to take the podium was our beloved President who quite forthrightly told the audience that unlike Mrs. Kirk, she didn't forgive Charley's killer, but hated him--and mostly them because our dear President has rarely backed away from a friendly conspiracy theory.

When MTG heard those two diametrically opposed positions, she shuddered deeply because she knew that one of them was the "Christian" way, while the other--hate speech from the Pres--was not.

That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me [Draper] in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.

That difference made MTG shudder because it reflected on her own faith, and her own contribution to what she and others call our "toxic political culture." She looked inward and saw her own toxicity, her own sin, to be more traditionally theological. She knew she'd been wrong and had to change. “After Charlie died," she wrote a friend, "I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”

Wow! That, my friends, is a story, in Christian terms, a testimony.

I have a bit of a better sense of what it took for the disciples to accept Saul, their fierce enemy, as Paul, servant of the Lord. It's hard to think of someone more loyal to the whole MAGA fantasy that the blond bombshell from Georgia, and suddenly I have to look to her as Mother Theresa?

That's tough sledding, even in a winter like ours.

Almost immediately, she quit the House, resigned from her political position. She also gave up her sustaining family in the MAGA movement. Almost immediately, her life was threatened, as was the life of her son, a college student.

For a ton of reasons, her story is a block-buster. Might it push other evangelicals to reconsider their intense loyalty to the Donald? Will MTG now quickly disappear, given that her ability to generate headlines is compromised? Can she be believed?--after all, it's the old "come-to-Jesus" story. Is she a harbinger of things to come?--might there be more MTGs? 

And there's this: Paul's Damascus Road experience was no dodge. It was authentic, something believers recognize. 

After all, miracles happen--just ask us.

Lully Lula

 

 Breughel, The Massacre of the Innocents

This morning, just hit the "Listen" button and don't bother reading.

https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2017-12-31/lully-lullay 

Who to believe?

First, you are to think always of God,

of Wankan-Tanka. Second, you are to

use all your powers to care for your

people and especially for the poor.

Black Moon, Hunkpapa Sioux

Long, long ago it seems, I was told--no, warned--that I should be careful around Native spirituality because it is, well, enchanting, but not as profoundly beautiful as it sometimes seems from the outside--and maybe especially by white-liberal types (meaning, someone like me).  

The "warn-er" was herself Native, a sincere Christian Cherokee, a writer named Diane Glancy, who has made it her dream to draw out the stories which delve into spirituality, both Native and Christian--and Christians in Native settings.

This morning's little reading in a book Barbara gave me for Christmas, 365 Days of Walking the Red Road, started with this quote by a man whose name I'd never seen before.   

But some approximations are too difficult to look past. For instance, those qualities of living--spirit-filled living--held up as exemplary by the "Red Road," include virtues like humility, respect, generosity, and wisdom. The kind of life sought on the Red Road is a spiritual, ethical life. For quick reference, run through the "Fruits of the Spirit" (Galatians 5): Love, Joy, Peace, Forbearance, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, Self-control. It's long, maybe a bit more comprehensive, but basically we're all talking the same language.

A decade ago, I did a book for Rehoboth School and Mission in New Mexico. I interviewed families who had been influenced by their experience there. One man, a retired lawyer, told me that before his father had sent him off to the mission school, his father warned him about listening too closely to talk about the white man's god, but he also told his son that he'd grown to like the people who ran the school and did the evangelical work on the reservation. He liked them not because they were Christians but because those white people believed in the same things his people did--something his own people called "the Beauty Way." If his son would go to school there, he'd learn about living spiritually, ethically--and his father greatly respected that way of life taught in the mission school.

Want a shorter catechism? How about Luke 10: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Now look up there at the top at the sermon delivered by someone named Black Moon. 

I'm not about to run out to Marty, South Dakota, try to find a Native church, and join up; but what I'm saying is that life itself, in a variety of avenues I've taken, has taught me to be far, far less sure of the Beauty Way is or has been in the tribe from whom I come.

One of the most conservative men I ever knew, Rev. Cornelius Van Schouwen, writing from the beleaguered country of France during WWII, couldn't help but feel at least something of what I'm talking about, even though the contrasting way of life is not Native--it's simply to believe where GIs worship and why.

The war teaches one to love the brotherhood of all Christians. As a chaplain, you don't ask a soldier what denomination he belongs to, but rather if he is a Christian.

Here, Van Schouwen is at his most theologically lenient. I am tempted to say it is the  moment at which he seems least sectarian through the years the diaries  present us. But a realization of the brotherhood of all Christians does not linger. 

 I can't help wishing it had.

Sunday morning meds from Psalm 32

 “. . .surely when the mighty waters rise, they will not reach him.”

I’ve been to Japan, studied Shintuism a bit, and not been seduced.  I’ve listened to ex-Buddhists describe their childhood faith but never felt much inclined to Buddhism either.  Native American religion interests me greatly, but I’m not about to jump into a breech cloth or a sweat lodge—well, maybe a sweat lodge.

 Last week, our preacher said the first commandment—to worship no other gods—is often a piece of cake if we think of Mohammed, for instance, or Buddha as God’s rivals.  He’s right. Most Christian believers aren’t tortured by their closet animism. 

 The god most of us really want to worship, our preacher said, is ourselves.  Pride is the first of the Seven Deadlies, and it has been since someone wrote up the list, since Adam and Eve wanted the apple God forbade, and since the instinct-like will to live was born in each of us.  We want what’s best for us—for better or for worse. The god God almighty doesn’t want us to worship is the glorious, omnipotent Me.

 I say that because I don’t always trust David. I trust the Word that emerges from his songs. I trust the God he trusts. I trust the truth of the scriptures themselves. But I don’t always trust him, and I don’t because, in this psalm at least, I think he’s protecting himself, like all of us do. Why shouldn’t he?  He’s human. 

 Psalm 32 starts so very well—a clear sense of intent, the thesis, proudly and yet lovingly proclaimed in the opening verses.  Then the story central to all believers, told well, convincingly, in the next four verses: he sings for joy because he’s been—hallelujah!—forgiven of his sins and miseries.

 Then things get messy. What he says next is understandable: Given what I’ve been through, he says, I hope all of you experience what I did of the glorious freedom of grace.  Fine. And then, “if you can.”  Odd sentiment, suggesting, of course, that our timing—or worse, God’s—could be off. Things may not work out. Strangely undercuts his enthusiasm, doesn’t it?  And then, “surely.” I don’t like where that word is positioned because it feels tentative—“surely you’ll not be harmed in danger.” Surely. Surely.  

 And then “you are my hiding place.”  Is David, post-Bathsheeba, post forgiveness, looking for a place to hide?  “You will protect me from trouble”???  From more Uriahs?  The great problems of the opening verses were not caused by enemies tearing down palace walls; they were created totally by destruction, pride as much as lust, David’s fierce desire to serve the great God of self—my wants, my needs, my sweet Bathsheeba.

 Even though he begins this psalm with triumph, there’s some shakiness.. He’s sure God’s forgiveness is the greatest thing that ever happened to him, he wants to sing his joy; but there’s a tentativeness in verses six and seven that has him pressing for words and even losing focus. He’s not even as sure as he’d like to sound. He’s not lying, but he sounds more like a salesman than a devout. 

 But then that very oh-so-human tenderness may be his greatest gift to believers thousands of years later, to us—that gift being that he sounds like we do.  Human.  Sometimes confident, sometimes not, sometimes wanting to be more confident than he is.  Sometimes even when we wants like mad to get it right, he gets it wrong.  So much like us. 

And—get this--still so much loved by the Lord. 

Rev. Tony Van Zanten (1935-2025)

It could be that I have no place in the commemoration, but something in me says that I do. The two of us hail from the same background, although I was never, as he was, a farm kid from northwest Iowa. But we were and are generational members of the same ethnic and religious tribe. We know and own the same culture markers--views of the Sabbath, the importance of Sunday worship, the sacraments, just two of them; we both have a Dordt diploma. Both of us have families who came to America from the 19th century Netherlands.

I honestly have no memories of him--of his reputation, yes, certainly, but of him, none. If I hadn't seen his pictures on the obits I picked up on the internet, I wouldn't have known what Rev. Tony Van Zanten looked like.

All of that having been said, I knew of him, knew, greatly, of him, knew him as a man who'd given his life for inner city ministry, mostly in Roseland, Illinois, a place largely abandoned by another band of 19th century immigrant Dutch, who found the Great Migration of African-American refugees from the American South too difficult to handle and therefore pulled up stakes and left for distant western and southern suburbs of Chicago.

Except Rev. and Mrs. Tony Van Zanten. They didn't leave. They came to Roseland precisely because of the people from the Great Migration. They came because a couple Iowa farm kids--Tony, from Rock Valley, his loving spouse Donna from Kanawha--decided somewhere in or around a stay in Harlem that inner city ministries was for them. They stayed. They put down roots. They loved and were loved.

Rev. Tony's death reminded me of a story that was, in all likelihood, vintage Tony Van Zanten. I wrote and directed a theater piece that told the history of the denomination in which both of us--all three of us, all four of us really, my wife too-- held membership, a theater piece, if I may say so, that was dearly beloved by a generation just a bit older than my own, a generation of the same tribe. Because it was so loved, the denomination determined to keep that theater piece around historically, so they found a place for a performance that could double as a stage for a video of the entire show--a high school performance hall on the west side of Chicago. 

Must have been a strange performance to witness because every few minutes the stage director would move the cameras or tell the cast to do the scene over again to get it right. 

That one-night event--staging and shooting--was very well attended, even though it was neither fish nor foul. But if you have access to a video of the show sometime, it's difficult not to notice that when the camera pans the crowd it picks up a row of four African-American men, maybe the only black faces in the crowd that night. Honestly, I didn't even notice them until I saw the video.

I got a letter from Rev. Tony Van Zanten sometime later. I may still have it, although a flood took out lots of those things from file drawers. I remember being shocked to read the return address was Rev. Tony because even though I don't think I ever met him, I most certainly knew of him. We had many mutual friends. During most of my life, few members of our tribe were as beloved as Rev. Tony for his peculiar and successful ministry.

The letter--handwritten--was maybe three pages long. It explained how he'd picked up four men from Roseland Christian Ministries, and told them he wanted them to come with him to this performance of sorts happening across town. He explained that he didn't tell them much about what they were going to see, but the five of them had hopped in the church van and made it to the performance hall in time to see the whole thing.

He wanted to see what they would think, he told me. He wanted to take four inner-city men along to the history of the very white CRC just to see what they would think. 

When it was over, he was thrilled, he said, because they loved it--not because of its spiritual content or because it offered a full gallery of music with which to sing along, although those things were part of its success. 

They were taken by the story, he said, because they never, ever presumed that the white members of the denomination that sponsored Roseland Christian Ministries were ever, ever poor. They had no idea. They only white people they knew, Pastor Tony told me in that letter, were, by their estimation, unimaginably rich. They had no idea that once upon a time they were dirt poor. 

That note stays with me, not simply because these four African-American guys really liked the show but because the show had presented an image of the white people they likely knew best as church people of limited means, almost half of whom had died in their first winter on Lake Michigan. 

He was thrilled because the story on stage had shaken them into a new and broader vision of members of Rev. Tony's church, and that's what Rev. Tony wanted me to know--that a show about Dutch immigrant ruffians, cultural inquisitors who loved nothing better than theological fencing, had made them readjust their perceptions of the white folks who came to Roseland Christian Ministries.

In all likelihood, that letter was swept away in the flood, but it's stored deeply in my heart, a story I've never told. 

Rev. Tony Van Zanten died on December 15, just a couple of weeks ago. 

There are hundreds of Rev. Tony stories. I have just one, a story I've never forgotten.

Should you care to visit his funeral service, there's a live stream available here.

Like Saints

When it came time to play them, we couldn't help wonder what the Catholics were thinking when they named the school "Immaculate Conception." Weird. If you're a sixth grade boy just about everything has something to do with sex. That Catholic school's weird name, whatever it meant, was about something good Christian boys had no business thinking about out loud, and the kids from that school plastered it on their uniforms? Seriously?

But we played 'em, weird name or not. As far as I remember, no teacher or coach from our school ever said much about the name. "Okay, guys, tomorrow we'll line up against 'Immaculate Conception.'" I don't think we giggled. It's just that when you thought about it a little--well, you know: it was something like foreskins and circumcision and all of that embarrassing stuff. When you're twelve, it's just weird that you'd say those words out loud.

When you leave the Raphael Rooms of the Vatican Museums, massive frescos that fill every square centimeter of your consciousness, you follow the flow into another space so laden with life-sized art you don't know where to look first because you're sure you'll miss something. And you will. 

Anyway, there she was, Mary mother of Jesus, Virgin Mary, in a bigger-than-life statue and surrounded by massive frescoes featuring dozens, even hundreds of human figures, some with addresses in this world, some, clearly, very much at home in the next.

It's the Room of the Immaculate Conception, and while I'd long ago come to understand the phrase in a 7th grade-boy way, I never took the time to think much, really, about the adoration of Mary, except in a very Protestant way--as silly. In this immense room, everything was the Immaculate Conception, not the divine act itself (although a score of artists have taken a shot at that), but the act's honored and historic place in Roman Catholic dogma and culture. 

In the huge wall behind the statue features two worlds. The world below is Rome--the Vatican, Pope and Cardinals all aligned for the celebration of the formal acceptance of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The world above features heaven (far left) and that other brimstone place (far right, where the sinners are, at this moment, falling from grace). Fig-leafed Adam and guilt-ridden Eve are on the cloud, upper right, Adam seemingly protecting his sinful mistress. 

But at the heart of the Heaven is the Trinity. There's a dove (the Holy Spirit) above Mary's head (she's in blue, traditionally), and she stands (while Christ and the Father sit) just a bit lower in foreground. Telling placements.

For centuries, the Roman Catholic church had accepted the belief that Mary was not only a virgin, but also, alone of all mankind, sinless. Not until 1854 did her divinity become defined as Catholic dogma, an act signed into canon law by Pope Pius IX. That moment is prominently featured in the center of the fresco, the Pope standing before his throne, surrounded by Cardinals, all of which makes this particular room, the Room of the Immaculate Conception, of far more recent vintage (1860s) than the Rafael Rooms next door (300 years older). The paint is still wet. 

Rome didn't make me any more Roman Catholic than I ever was, but for two weeks 

I was most definitely more of a disciple of that whole world than I'd ever been. Somehow the visual grace, art that attracts millions annually, helped me understand far more than I ever had about the historic church, even has me smiling in a whole new way at those grade school kids with that weird name printed on their basketball uniforms. 

It really, really was a big deal. That big, in fact.

I never had a problem with that wonderful last line of the Luke 2 story--"and Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart" (NIV), nor did i ever fume about her remarkable--"divine"--compliance to the angel's bizarre directives a chapter earlier: "May it happen to me according to your word,” she says at the angel's annunciation. She's what?--13 maybe, and she's about to be pregnant while unmarried, and, as yet, untouched in any ordinary ways.

The Lord God almighty knew what he was doing when he picked Mary out of the gallery. He wanted--and he got--someone who'd do whatever had to be done. "Of course," she could have said. "When should I write it in my calendar?"

But just last night, we listened to Rev. Andrew Kuyvenhoven point us at the strangely, and equally compliant husband-to-be, who likely understood he was going to have to fib to get this one through the ringer.

They're hardly human, those two. They get visited supernaturally--who's to say it wasn't just a bizarre dream?--and just like that, they fold, both of them. "Sure, Lord God," they say. "When does this whole thing begin?"

"How about this?" the Creator might have told them--"at the beginning of time,'"

I doubt that would have stopped them either. They just trust too much. They're like saints.

 

A Prayer for the Dead -- vi

Technically, the story is over when Bea ponders the star her mother deliberately placed beneath the linoleum cover they put on their kitchen table. At that point, Bea had begun to wonder whether she'd lived her life in the right way with respect to her missionary parents. That moment was the technical climax of the story.

The writer (that's me) has to make sure, as sure as my artistic sense will allow, that my readers come to see that, once this Christmas night is behind them, something big and basic will have changed in the way that Bea remembers her parents and sees the world. 

I've got to use that star.

_____________________  

She pulled her jacket over her shoulders, looking back at the dead baby, a gift for her blessed parents [she means that sarcastically, of course]. She stepped outside where Shorty was already waiting, and when he opened the door, she saw a bottle of beer between his legs. She pulled herself into the Pontiac and stared back at the porch light. It was the same car she would drive back from California herself a year later, alone and penniless, their little Frank, hungry, in the front seat beside her. 

What she'd done, Char had said. [She hasn't forgotten her daughter's accusation.] 

She put the cap back on the stripper and tossed the steel wool in the garbage, still holding the star. She'd had enough of refinishing for Christmas Eve. It was a holiday. There'd be more to get off and the legs to do before the dark cherry stain could reach into the old surface and pull out all the edges of the grain. 

She took Myron's flannel work-shirt off her shoulders and hung it from a nail, then used the rubber gloves to pick up the soggy steel wool and drop it in the can beside the door. She kicked clean newspapers over the clots of stripper that had dropped to the floor from the table, and rubbed the back of her hand over the clean wood. She walked over to the door and looked outside over the neighbor's fence at Christmas lights down the street where families stayed together [a bit of jealousy here]. 

She went inside and plugged in the coffee with her left hand and opened the refrigerator to a cake pan of brownies she'd made just that afternoon for Char. She slipped open the silverware drawer with her little finger and took out a paring knife, then carried the fudge back to the kitchen table, the medallion in the same hand as a paper plate she took from the counter. Behind her, the coffee maker snorted. It would be ready for Myron later. 

What would she do with the star? [That's the question I'm facing when I'm here in the writing of the story.] She sat at the table and laid it in front of her. Someone had lifted it finally from its secret place. It wasn't hidden anymore. She had to do something with it--her mother's desert star. 

She sliced through the pan of brownies in perfect squares, lifted one from the pan and ate it from the spatula, then took another piece from the pan and laid it on the edge of the dinner plate, then another and another. When she filled the plate with two circles of fudge, she reached up for wax paper to cover the bottom layer, then started in on more. 

It didn't really belong here in this house, she thought. Her mother had buried it for some reason she might never know or understand, stuck it away like a secret, and now it was unearthed. She reached in the junk drawer and found a piece of red thread, then poked the end through the weave of the star and held it up to dangle like a Christmas ornament. It needed to hang somewhere, she thought. Char already had the table. She could keep it herself, she thought--something from her mother, something from the grandma Char said she'd never had. [I'm running through some possibilities.]  

She emptied the pan, she ripped another piece of wax paper from the roll and covered the brownies completely. It was her mother's star, she thought, her mother's secret, something she would never under­stand, and her mother deserved it now, in the Indian way, part of herself, a memorial. [I've figured it out, but the mystery remains for you, I hope.] 

She left a note for Myron that said she loved him and not to wait up because she'd be back all right and she'd tell him about it in the morn­ing. Then she drove out of town, past the lights and the traffic until the city was a glowing dome in the darkness behind her and the edges of the mountains seemed a shroud thrown down at the horizon to cover stars in the dark desert sky. She knew she could find their graves in the darkness because they would be the only uncluttered stones in the cemetery, the only sites not decorated with offerings for the dead. She could find them. She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. [She's bound for her parents' graves in a cemetery at the mission.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children.  

_____________________________ 

And that's why. Let's just step lightly through this last part of the story. 

She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. ["Should have been," she tells herself. This self-criticism is new; the Bea at the beginning of the story would not have incriminated herself that way.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. [Way back when, this friend of mine told me he hadn't really stopped resenting his parents until he saw the many Native folks who came for the funeral. When he noticed specifically who his parents had given their lives for, he was overwhelmed, even thrilled. I bring it back here to suggest that Bea was equally moved by her brother's report.] She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies [this is a very Native thing to do, which is why Bea adopts the idea. If she puts the plate of brownies alongside the star, it will likely be the only decorations on her parents' graves--and her parents' graves may well be the only stones left undecorated since her parents' views of the afterlife differ clearly from Native rites and rituals. Protestant Christians don't "pray for the dead." Bea puts those things on her parents' grave on Christmas Eve because she blesses them, in all likelihood for the first time in her life.] because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children [ouch, but that she says it makes her just as human as you or I].  

A Prayer for the Dead -- v

If we were to analyze the arc of the story via traditional means, we could say, right now, that the story itself--the conflict that pushes it--is over. The story is finished because Bea has changed. She isn't who she was when the story began. For the first time in years, this Christmas Eve, Bea is allowing herself the space to think that maybe, just maybe, she had judged her mother and her mother's life too rigidly. Maybe her mother wasn't the pariah she'd built her to be in her mind, her memory, and her imagination.

But there needs to be more--the bit of story structure English teachers call the denouement, the untying or the "un-knot" of the story. Stories begin with knots, with tangled lines or messed-up conflicts. When those conflicts unravel, things get straightened out. 

Now, the writer--me--has to figure out how to artfully untie the knot--the major conflicts present in the story.

The first paragraph of this last section is rife with possibilities--she's pregnant, her parents don't know yet, and she's met at the door by a woman who brings a dead baby.

Such things happened frequently in the early days of the mission. Navajos had long nursed a deep fear of the dead, so much trauma, in fact, that they would bring dead bodies to the missionaries to take care of things; they knew that, for whatever reason, white people didn't harbor that fear. 

That's what's happening in the flashback Bea now explains.

 _____________________ 

The last prayer she'd spoken aloud she'd delivered over a dead baby brought by a Navajo woman to the mission house on a night both her parents were doing camp visits somewhere beneath the open desert sky. She'd come home herself earlier that afternoon without telling them she was on her way because she was pregnant with Frank, by Shorty Toledo. They knew about him-and she'd come home to tell them she was leaving with him, quitting the boarding school. 

It was 1946 and Shorty had come back from the war in his uniform, wild. She was seventeen, and when she'd come in the back door, bold and rebellious, she'd found the countertop stacked with empty cake pans and cookie sheets, and the Bible in its place on the table, its black covers worn away from the pages. She'd run through the house when no one answered her calls, thrown open the closet doors upstairs as if she would find her parents hiding from her, then slammed them shut behind her. 

She'd been home for an hour, maybe more, sitting on the steps, cry­ing in anger, when the bell rang. Some Navajos were afraid of evil spirits still inhabiting the dead. It had happened before. The front bell would ring and some woman would be standing there in silence, her long, pleated dress tossing softly in the breeze. If she would ask her father to come out to bury the dead, sometimes he would build a coffin in the horse barn while her mother packed extra clothes, baby clothes. 

"If Mother Van is not here," the woman had said, "then you will take him?" She nodded toward the bundle in her arms and held it out to her. "Pray now, please," the woman said. "Pray for my child. So Bea had taken the body, stiff beneath the blankets, and prayed then and there on the front steps, some chanted memory prayer that came to her in anger and remorse, pagan too, her father would have said-a prayer for the dead. She spoke only a few repeated words because she knew the woman needed only to hear supplication from the Anglo girl on the porch, Mother Van's own daughter. When she opened her eyes, the woman smiled, then started back up the road, leaving the body. 

[Bea's prayer was hardly that; yet, it's clear to her that it was just what this mourning young mother needed.]

She was seventeen, pregnant, full of silly plans. She came down off the steps and walked to the gate at the front of the yard, the weight of death in her arms, then ran a ways up the road. But the Indian woman set herself resolutely into the night, her agony gone. It would be useless to try to give the baby back, a betrayal. 

It was spring and the night's mellow warmth promised the summer that was surely to come, the dark skies embedded with stars. The wail of coyotes broke the desert darkness, and amid the snarls of Indian dogs shivering through the stillness, she stood there hoping to see her parents' headlights emerge from the horizon of darkness, still holding a dead baby. A baby-and not a baby. The child, stiff and heavy in her arms, was nothing but cold weight, host to legions of evil spirits. She opened the blankets to a face that paled even in the darkness, its eyes closed, a shock of dark hair clumped over its pointed gray forehead. 

Her parents would want to know who: maybe Eloise, or Christine, or Francy? "Did you see her face-maybe the way she wore her hair?" her mother would say. "Who was in the family way?" her father would ask, frantically. "What do you remember-something to distinguish her clothing-some jewelry maybe?-a sash?" her mother would wonder, and the moment they would hazard a guess, they would leave to find the woman, to comfort the pain. 

The night was moonless, she remembered, as dark as night can be on the desert, the cottonwoods behind the mission house full of mournful owls. She'd held the body with her left arm and gone into the house, pushed the light switches with her right hand until she got to the kitchen, where she laid it down, the blankets closed up tight around its face. When she looked out the window, she saw lights finally coming up the road. She glanced at the clock and knew it would be Shorty. 

She took a pencil from the kitchen drawer and some envelopes from between the pages of the Bible. "Mother," she scribbled in the margin, but even the word sounded wrong. She glanced again out toward the road. It had to be Shorty--he was coming too fast. How could she say what she had to? How could she explain why she was home? How could she tell them everything? "Mother," she wrote. "I was here and you two were gone." That was all.

____________________ 

One more bit to go, not much. 

"I was here and you two were gone" is a summary of what Bea believes her childhood to have been. This time, however, it's not a metaphor. She had so much to say and no one to say it to.

Prayer for the Dead — iv

There's a significant revelation in the next two paragraphs. You'll see it. Remember, what I want to do with this story is somehow bring Bea back to peace. It's an easy thing to do--just introduce the Holy Spirit. But if my writing is going to score with people who don't share my view of "revelation," I've got to make the shimmering moments glisten. I can't simply bring in the Big Guns: ". . .and there stood Jesus before her. . ."

It's Christmas Eve remember, and Bea is alone--not a night to be alone. Not only that, but she just got a tongue-lashing from her daughter. And now this little piece of homespun craft carefully sealed up beneath a layer of linoleum her parents had put there to prevent extra wear. 

___________________________________

Bea pulled her gloves up above the wrists and took two steel wool pads from the box on the shelf, balled them together for heft, then scoured a two-inch circle down to bare wood to see which direction the grain ran.

But if her mother had wanted to put the medallion out of her mind forever, she could have walked any direction from her back door and simply buried it—no one would ever have found it. She wouldn't have to slide it into an envelope and hide it beneath the surface of the
table she used every day. She wanted it there, Bea thought. She needed it there for some reason. Maybe late at night, her husband out on camp ministry, her own children miles away at the mission school, after a dozen Indian children had eaten her cake and listened to Bible stories, she could shut the door, steal a few moments alone here at the table, stretching her fingers over something like a fetish, an outline so faint she was the only one who knew it existed. Her mother the heathen. Maybe the two of them were more alike than she'd ever thought.

She stripped off the gloves, picked up the star, and studied the knots at each of the points, remembering how easily the shuttle flitted be­tween her mother's fingers as she turned out stitches so effortlessly that the whole action seemed instinct. Her shuttle was inlaid, she remembered, turquoise and something dark--maybe petrified wood. It might have been a gift, something from an Indian woman, almost certainly Indian-made.

She turned the star in her fingers. Maybe she never knew her mother at all.

She pulled a glove back on her hand and picked up the steel wool. Maybe if she were to find the tatting, she thought--that carpetbag her mother kept in the bottom drawer of the buffet--maybe there would be more. She looked up at the clock. She could still call Peter. It was early, and Myron would have lots more stops. She scoured the stripper she'd painted on the surface in firm scrapes, pushing it away from her and with the grain into globs thick with dirt and finish and scraps of the old adhesive, leaving bare wood beneath.

She found her brother's number penciled in the back of the book hanging by a shoestring from the phone. "Peter," she said when he finally picked up the receiver, "it's your sister. Listen, I know it's Christmas Eve, but I was wondering-" she stopped, trying to arrange a question she hadn't yet worded. "Mom used to do tatting."

"Bea," he said, "are you drunk?"

"No. Listen, she used to do tatting--remember?"

"Tatting," he repeated, not as a question.

"Fine little things, like doilies. She'd sit in the chair by the pole lamp-nights? You know those things she'd made to go on the arms of the sofa? Little handwork stuff, lace."

“Okay, okay,” he said.

"When you cleaned up her place, did you find that carpetbag, her sewing things--did you find a little shuttle? --she called it a shuttle. Silver ­inlaid, like Zuni stuff?"

"What's it look like?" he said.

"Thin, streamlined-like a lipstick tube, a little bigger--a spool in the middle. She'd wind the string around that spool--"

"I don't think I saw it," he said. "You want it?"

What could she say? When her father had died, Peter had asked whether there was anything of her parents she wanted, anything at all, and she had told him to give everything away, every last bit. "Dump what you can't sell," she'd told him.

"You okay, Sis? What's got into you?" he asked.

"I just wondered," she said.

"It must be worth something," he said.

"It is," she said.

"How much?"

“I just wondered if you saw it anywhere--tiny as a minnow, even shorter. Inlaid. She had it for years.”

He laughed. "How much is it worth, Bea?" he said.

"A lot."

'Tm down to one box, here--mostly little stuff. I gave away most of the sewing stuff. I could look, but if I'd have known that you wanted it--"

"Would you?" Bea asked him.

"Now?"

"Please?"

"It's Christmas Eve. How much is this gadget worth?"

"Trust me," she told him.

"Silver thing--inlaid. How big?"

"Thumb-size."

When he put down the phone, she heard the low pitch of adults laughing softly, interrupted by busy voices of children. A shuttle, it was second nature to her mother to use it. It would slip between her fingers almost as if it were alive, even while she was reading or talking. She cradled the receiver in her neck and held the star up before her eyes.

"I looked through everything I got here--you know, there's some stuff you might like, Bea. I know how you feel--"

"You don't have it?"

"There's really not much here anymore, you know. It's been three months since the funeral."

"You never saw it?"

"What're you getting for it anyway? Must be worth a mint."

"It's not that," Bea told him.

"Then what is it?"

Tell him, she thought, go on and tell him. "I want it myself, Peter," she said. "It's something of mother's, and I guess I just want it."

He was stunned, then chuckled a little. "Is that right? Christmas spirit or something?--you're sure you're not drinking?"

"I wondered if you had it," she said. "She used to work at nights sometimes, and that shuttle slipped through her fingers as if it were alive. When we were little-"

"I don't have it, sis," he said. "I wish I did, for your sake--and hers too."

''I know, I know," she said. 'Tm sorry."

"You are--really?"

'Tm sorry for not asking--"

"Oh," he said. "You wouldn't believe how much stuff I left there." There was laughter behind him. "I only wished you'd asked."

“I figured your daughter might like the table--it's an antique, you know?"

“I know—it’s here.”

"You’ll refinish it for her?"

She waited. "It's a lot of work," she told him. "I don't think I got the time."

She heard her brother breathe heavily over the phone. "Bea, you should have seen them at the funeral--all the people. They came from miles around. Seriously, hundreds of people. Remember how the folks used to spend years without seeing one new face in that little church?--years, Bea. Not one. If it was a business, they would have shut it down. But you should have seen the people. They came from all over the reservation--"

"Merry Christmas, Peter," she said.

He stopped, waited. "Same to you, sis," he told her.

She hung up the phone and looked at the star as if there were more to the mystery, more to her mother than she'd ever thought. Then she brought it up to her eyes in a fist.

_____________________ 

So this friend of mine, who was reared on the reservation, an MK (missionary kid) told me he was all of 35 before he could forgive his parents. And he knew the exact moment he could forgive them--it was at his father's funeral when literally hundreds of people showed up. He had had no idea. They were there for Rev. Van. All those people--all those Native folks--he couldn't believe it. Made him see so much of his life in a different, wider setting.

And now I have to write my way out of this story. There's already a new interest and sympathy, but there's the matter of that little embroidered thing she found buried beneath the linoleum and the hardwood beneath.

One more day.

Hope in the Longest Night

This edition of my weekly radio podcast Small Wonders (KWIT, Sioux City, IA, an NPR affiliate) has to rank as one my all-time favorites. It's seven years old, but it attempts to satisfy all kinds of people and their various ambitions for the holiday seasons we're beginning, or in, right now. 

I really do love this one.

Listen in here,

Prayer for the Dead -- iii

To say Bea Van Klay is "haunted" by memories is going too far. The memories stick with her, in part, because they feed her anger at her parents for what she thinks of as their abandonment, their deep conviction that bringing the gospel to the Navajo is a far more important task than raising their children.  Did they love their daughter?--without a doubt, they did. They were merely following conviction and convention, and I'm sure that her rebellion against them and their way of life was devastating. 

Meanwhile, it's Christmas, she's refinishing her parents' old dining room table, an antique, while her husband is out playing Santa to his work crew. Her daughter has called and unloaded on her, telling her she doesn't want her children to go through a childhood like she did--without grandparents.

Her situation prompts her memory to replay some of the ancient offenses, the ones that she relies on to fuel her very human anger. Throughout her life, Bea has lost her faith, but I want to do with the story is at least begin to bring her back. We reenter the story with a flashback.

I was refinishing a table when I wrote the story, and I remember thinking that something as old as the table I was working on held secrets, had to. Okay, what if, long ago, someone deliberately hid something beneath the linoleum covers people put on their tables back then? What might it be and why was it there. Fiction is often a matter of "what if?"

__________________


In the middle of the night her parents are awake. She hears the bed wince as they rise together, the closet doors shiver open, clothes rus­tle. They wake her, tell her they must leave. They'll be back, they tell her, her father's stark outline bathed in the light from the hallways as he stands at the foot of her bed. They leave, and she and Peter are alone.

"Just about your age," her mother told her, "and so much like you­--your height almost. Dark eyes. Esther Nez. She'd found peace, sweetheart. She's been forgiven. Isn't it wonderful?"

The table stood between them. When she wouldn't answer their question, her mother drew back from her father's arms, brought her hands up to her eyes.

"Do you know the Lord, Bea?" her father asked. "That's what we need to know," he said. "Do you know Jesus?"

She felt her father's eyes planted. They never shifted, even when she gathered her strength and stared back at him, as if cursing. "Yes, of course. Of course, I do."

The arrogance of her answer kept them from asking again.

Mutton they had for dinner that Christmas Day because everywhere you looked in those days sheep wandered the reservation. Mutton and beans. Bread and coffee.

She pulled another putty-knife from the rack, a small one, then plugged in the emery wheel on the workbench and slid the edge of the knife across the whirr, shooting sparks up toward the calendar girl Myron had pinned up on the tagboard years ago. She had to be careful because she didn't want to gouge the surface, even though she could sand away light slips easily enough.

A half dozen linoleum strips still stuck to the table. She lay the edge of the putty-knife at the point of the largest chunk, raised her wrist against the play of the blade, jammed it into the seam, lifting the linoleum, then picked up the corner once it was loose enough to grab with her fingers.

"What she'd done," Bea thought, just because Char thinks it's her job to bring peace now that she's found Reverend Van's Jesus. But it won't happen, not with both of them dead, her mother years ago already and now her father too, laid on that slope above the shacks in the little town he'd made up his mind never to leave, both of them asleep in the cemetery where food offerings for the dead littered the ground with pagan honor.

She pushed the blade beneath the biggest chunk and grabbed what she'd turned up, then jerked the knife along--like skinning an animal, the way the Indian boys used to tug the bluish pelt from a rabbit's back with a wet ripping sound. She curled the piece into her fingers, put down the knife and wrapped her other hand around her wrist, then leaned over the table to balance herself, jerked hard, and the whole diamond-shaped piece came off in her hands, wide as a book cover.

She tossed it in the shopping bag with the rest of what she'd already scraped, but it twisted as it fell, and she saw something shiny, glim­mering as if wet. She reached down into the bag and when she pulled it out again she found a star in a cellophane wrapper stuck to the back of the linoleum.

At first glance she thought it was something scissors-cut from very delicate paper, but when she tore it loose from the back of the linoleum it was thicker than paper-something fabric instead, or woven. Tatting, that's what it was--a tatted medallion star.

She looked back at the table, at the spot where it had come up, and found no trace of adhesive, the dull, unsullied grain where it had lain the only clean spot on the surface. That star had been wrapped in cellophane and laid purposely under the thick linoleum. It was small enough to fit easily in the bowl of her palm, its points done in some intricate and personal weave like some language not yet written. Years before, her mother had worked sometimes at night, in those dark even­ing hours of winter, the shuttle a glint of silver passing expertly in and out of her open fingers as she nimbly turned out a cluster of tightened stitches, doilies, edging from handkerchiefs, and sometimes antimacassars--like the linoleum, to protect the back or arms of the sofa. A star in the desert, she thought, a hidden medallion star buried beneath the tabletop. Her mother's work. She removed it from the brit­tle cellophane. Its ecru knots, small, hardened fists, were shaped into a design so fine that one could easily forget the hours it took to create its delicate edges.

But why would her mother have buried it that way, laid a little piece of lace beneath her own tabletop?--a star, she thought, a desert star like a miracle from the bottom of the table, something unexpected, a little glint of beauty like a sign, she thought. Maybe like a testimony. It didn't really matter who would eventually strip back the linoleum and find her little miracle underneath--it could be Mother Van's only daughter or any of a hundred Esthers. She'd put the star there like a Bible story, like the gospel tracts she'd always leave in the Albuquerque bus sta­tion, a testimony planted for some wayward soul lost in the wilderness. She'd put it there so she could go to her death knowing that she still had one last tatted voice pointing to Jesus. Just more of the same, Bea thought.

When she opened the stripper, the can exhaled fumes that stung her eyes. She pulled on her rubber gloves and poured it over the table sur­face, the brash smell lining her nose as she spread clumps flat over the wood, the last slivers of linoleum, and the tracks of the adhesive. It was so much like her mother she almost had to laugh, a bad joke on her daughter. The one thing of her mother's she had touched in more than forty years, and it comes up as just another sermon. The stripper soaked up the old surface and turned cold where it dirtied her gloves.

But how could she know it would be her daughter? Maybe preaching wasn't the idea. After all, only someone already a Christian could read the symbol right. It would mean little to a Navajo. Besides, if her mother wanted to bury a tract, she could have. Maybe as a young bride she buried it the way the hired man in the parable buried the one talent the master had given him--because she feared the stiffness of her hus­band's commitment, was afraid of what he might say about silly lace. Over the years, maybe her mother had taught herself to mistrust something which existed for beauty's sake alone, as if her medallion were a token of selfish pleasure. Maybe she'd buried it because it was only beauty.

Prayers for the Dead -- ii

Bea gets a friendly Christmas-season call from Char, her daughter and friend, who has her warm and seasonal aspirations on Christmas Eve.

"We just thought we'd call, Mom," Char said. "We just opened presents and the kids are all busy by the tree. I thought I'd wish you a Merry Christmas."

"You didn't have to do that," she told her daughter.

"Dad's gone, I suppose?" Char asked.

"He's on the sleigh. It's something he's got to do now, whether or not he wants to," she said. "His men expect it."

"You mean he didn't want to go?"

"You know your father," she told her, "the damned fool."

''I'll get Randy to run you over here," Charlotte said. "I don't like the idea of you sitting there alone on Christmas Eve again. What are you doing anyway?"

She looked back at the putty-knife stuck beneath the linoleum. "I'm watching TV," she said. "Don't worry about me. If you pick me up, your father won't know up from down when he steps in the front door. You know how he gets."

"He shouldn't drive, Mom," she said.

"Sure," she said, "of course, he shouldn't drive."

'Tm serious," Char told her.

"And so am I." She twirled the cord in her fingers. "He thinks every Santa Claus gets a Rudolph or who-knows-what other kind of grace to get him home safely."

"I think you shouldn't be alone, not on Christmas Eve."

"Been that way for years," Bea said.

In the background she could hear the children buzzing and carols, the kind of Christmas music she'd expect from Char now that the whole family had found Jesus, all of them baptized.

"You're welcome to come to church with us tomorrow, Mom," Char said, "on Christmas Day."

“I know what day it is.”

"I just thought I'd mention it."

"I have my crossword puzzles and there's a Bob Hope special com­ing up. You just get back to your family." She looked up at the clock above the tool rack. "He'll be back--"

"It's early," Char said. "I just wish he wouldn't drink."

"Keep your nose out of his business, Charlotte."

"Randy can be there in fifteen minutes, Mom. You should see Brandon--he's sitting here on the floor already building all kinds of things, and Sarah's dressed up--"

"I got Myron to tend to--"

"Tomorrow, then?"

"Tomorrow what?"

"Tomorrow church."

"Tomorrow he's got a headache. Maybe we'll stop over in the afternoon once he sleeps it off."

"They're your grandchildren--the only ones you have. They love you too." Char stopped for just a second, took a breath. "Listen, I won't let you do to them what you did to me-and your mother."

Bea let that line alone.

"Did you hear me?" Char said.

"What's that?"

"I said I won't let you do what you did to me--and what you did to your mother,” she repeated.

“What was that again?”

"You know damn well, Mother." Her voice abruptly lost that Christmas-y tone. "I never had a grandma," Char said. “That’s what.”

Bea looked at the phone, then laid it back on the hook. “What she'd done,” she thought, “what she'd done.” Char ought to know sometime what nine months in the basement of the school was like-right beside the washtub's leaky faucets. What it felt like to be a kid scared to death of rats, just seven years old--a boarding student. How she'd cry on Mon­days when her father would get her up in the mornings so early the sun was barely set from the day before, get her and Peter up to take them to Split Rock mission school, how she'd be there all week long until her sometimes-father drove back to pick them up. "Did you have a good week at school?" he'd say, and then his mind would wander out into the desert, some hogan. By third grade--no more--she quit answering his polite questions.

_____________________

Just a word about the "ins" here, the quickly told stories Bea doesn't tell her daughter but relives herself are, of course, back story, a reflection of the past she can't help going through because of what her daughter has said--"what she'd done." Fifty years ago, missionaries most always brought their children to the Mission School while doing their evangelism all around the reservation. My friend told me he felt abused and abandoned--he was five and staying with another kid in some basement "apartment." What Bea remembers here is all taken from the experiences told me by the other youth leader at the retreat. We talked--he talked--late into the night. He had much to say.

Prayer for the Dead (a story for Christmas) -- i

 

I remembered yesterday that I'd once written a short story about a woman who'd got herself tossed out of a family by her missionary parents, a story about her life one Christmas when she found herself almost mysteriously led back towards parents she'd come to hating (it's a long story). I've been flirting seriously with one last book of short stories, stories whose origins are stories in themselves, like this one. 

One night at Rehoboth, New Mexico, I listened to a son of long-ago missionaries tell me of his anger at his parents for what they'd done to him (again, a long story). We were staying up late because we were on guard duty--it was a youth retreat and both of us were youth group leaders from Phoenix, Arizona, who'd come with our church kids to the reservation.

It was an unforgettable night for me because he told me things I really wouldn't have understood without him. He said it took him many years to come to terms and make peace with his parents. His sister--I asked him about her--she still hadn't, he told me.

So the historical background of the story includes missionaries on the Native reservations. In my short story, both parents have passed away, but their daughter--like my friend's sister--was holding out. Bea is that rebel, the one far away from the fold. She's refinishing an old oak table, the one her parents kept in their dining room for just about all of their married lives. Her daughter wanted to keep it--well, discover for yourselves in "Prayer for the Dead." 

The story will run 'till Christmas.

______________________________

Every Christmas her father used to say that when Jesus would come to earth again he'd feel at home on the reservation because the desert would remind him of the Holy Land. Then Dad would close the Bible, having read Luke 2 once more. "Bethlehem probably looks just like Split Rock," he'd say, the town where Beatrice Van Kley spent sixteen years, every school year of her life, and a place she never considered holy at all.

She opened the side door so the fumes from the stripper would escape the garage to the cold darkness. Just above the fence between the lots, reflections from Christmas lights at most every home down the block glanced off the shiny tops of two cars parked next door.

She tugged the exercise bike off to the side, in front of the washer and dryer, and laid newspapers down over the floor where she'd planned to do the work. She'd spent an hour before supper redoing a seam on Myron's Santa suit, where somehow last year, his elbows up, he'd jerked out the stitches again, creating a wide gap that yawned open to his T-shirt the minute he crossed his arms. "You can't wear it this way," she'd told him. "You're silly enough doing this every year, but I won't have you leaving here all torn up--even if that's the way you come back."

"As if anyone cares," he'd told her. "They're not checking my seams, Tootie. This is Christmas Eve."

"Just the same," she'd said, "take it off and let me fix it. I don't want my husband looking like something from St. Vincent De Paul."

Eight stops he'd make this year. At each of his employees' houses he'd drop in, not unexpectedly, with a bonus turkey and a little stray cash, a Christmas cowboy in a thick white beard. The life of the party. Always. And every place he'd go, he'd have a drink. Or two.

"And don’t come home sloppy,” she’d tell him. “You’re the only Santa Claus I know that's likely to fall into a fireplace without going down a chimney."

"Where's your holiday spirit?" he'd said.

"You're my holiday spirit," she told him, taking his last kiss on the lips before he left.

Her son Frank lived in Denver--her son by Shorty Toledo, the Hopi she'd never married. Frank showed up once or twice a year if he needed money, or phoned when he got in trouble. Otherwise, she never saw him. The first time he'd stood before a juvenile judge, a man whose mustache swirled down almost to a goatee, he'd been given a slap on the wrist for breaking into vacant houses. She'd wondered whether his getting off easily was really best for a kid who had only ever been a problem. She couldn't help thinking there was a kind of paren­tal justice going on with Frank. 

She'd married Myron Burnett, part Apache but not much Indian, five years later, in 1951, at a JP just across the Nevada border, and not at all on a whim.

She rolled the table over to the newspapers from the spot where daughter Char had left it. "We'll pay you, Mom--that's not it. We're not looking for a gift," Charlotte had said. "It's just that you do such a nice job."

She wasn't so foolish as to miss the irony: Beatrice Van Kley lifting linoleum off her parents' table, stripping it down, then anointing it with a new stain sharp enough to bring life back to grain no one had ever seen. Char had picked it up from her uncle Peter when he came back from the reservation pulling a trailer full of things he said were worth more to him than what he could get at auction. Her brother had buried their father in the cemetery Dad, Reverend Van, always considered half-pagan, decorated as it was with food offerings honoring the dead, sandwiches left open in Saran Wrap, paper cups half full of Coke, toys, soccer balls.

Char said she wanted the table. She had begun to care about things like that, about missionary grandparents she'd never really known and a story Bea thought much better left to un­written history.

Years ago, her mother had covered her kitchen table with a heavy layer of linoleum that protected the new surface from wear. Both parents were dead and gone; they'd never appreciate the beauty they'd hidden away. Typical, she thought. Her mother was likely saving the finish for the second coming.

She pulled the edge of the linoleum high enough to slide a putty-knife underneath. Getting the linoleum off would be the worst job. It would tear off in shards and what she couldn't rip she'd have to inch off slowly. When the phone rang, she waded through gutter spouts Myron left around the garage and took the receiver from the wall.

______________________

Tomorrow: A phone call from her daughter leads into a further exploration of Bea's fractured parental relationships and her life these days.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“. . .while you may be found.”

 Emily Dickinson is haunting. One of her many poems that will never leave me is one numbered “LV,” which begins “I know that he exists/Somewhere, in silence.” Profound sadness fills that opening line. She knows he is there—she doesn’t doubt his presence for moment; but He is silent.

He has, she goes on to say, “hid his rare life/From our gross eyes.” I think of a million prayers from Dachau and Auschwitz; a young mother mourning her son, killed on a motorcycle; a grandpa whose grandson was swept away in a prairie creek, the body never found.

Sometimes it seems that God has simply left the building.

Then Ms. Emily sports with this peek-a-boo behavior. “’Tis an instant’s play,” she says, “a fond ambush,/just to make bliss [ours, of course] earn her own surprise!” Notice the exclamation point. God plays with us, and isn’t that cute, she says, tongue in cheek.

“But should the play/Prove piercing earnest”—as it has last week in a million places around the world, in a million grieving families, “Should the glee” from this little game of hide-and-seek God is so fond of—should that glee “glaze/In death’s stiff stare,/Would not the fun/Look too expensive?”

What if we call on his name—what if our souls scream at the shocking death of a thirteen-year-old boy who won’t see another spring, will never kick a soccer ball, or lean into his mother’s shoulder on the couch before bed—what if God is playing this silly game at the moment we need Him most? That’s what she is asking.

Then—and it happens to many of us—“Would not the jest/Have crawled too far?”

The awful word here is crawled, because that word suggests a god who is, at best perhaps, a worm. Or sickness—this cute little game of his crawls.

I know some believers who can read Dickinson and not feel what she does. Some sanctified smiles simply write her off. But Dickinson is haunting because she’s on to something most believers feel during at least some moments of their lives—and she is a believer: “I know that he exists,” she says to start the poem. “I know.”

A line like David’s warning at the end of verse six inflames Ms. Emily’s anger in “lv.” David has just laid out the essence of God’s love—his forgiveness. Then he adds this caveat—“while he may be found.” In the words of the old psalm we used to sing, “Then let the Godly seek thee in times when thou art near,” especially then because it seems anyway that he’s not always conveniently located.

The most horrifying suggestion of David’s assertion is that sometimes he leaves.

If that makes no sense, you’ve begun to understand, I think, because it would be so humanly satisfying to create a God out of our finest aspirations.

But God is God. We worship him, not because he is the best of my dreams or imaginings, but because he is, ultimately, not made of what we are. He is not the best I can create on this page or pages, he is eternally much, much more.

His ways—and sometimes his seeming absences—are simply beyond our ken.

He is God. We are not.

Those who worship him, worship him in that fear, that unfathomable regard, that profoundly mystifying awe. We worship Him on our knees.   

Brooding Upon the Waters

Before you get all priggish and tell me that I've got no business reviewing a book by a Dordt prof named Schaap, let me explain. It's not mine. Friend and former colleague in arms, Howard Schaap (no relation) has published (it's taken some painful time) his father/son story, not as fiction but memoir--including names and dates and places. He's titled it Brooding Upon the Waters, maybe a bit pretentious, but just about perfectly fitting for what's inside the covers, a life lived in the shadow of his father's bi-polar world. Brooding is a beautiful book, but it's not at all pretty.

It's beauty arises from its almost perfectly arranged weave of significant tropes; first, the trials of father Milt's mental/emotional illness, which serves as the  major track of the novel--Milt's manic ups and downs. Second, Howard's own highly developed sense of place (it's set here in Siouxland, in southwest Minnesota) and the identity this particular landscape bestows on those who live  here, whether they like it or not. Amazingly but convincingly, Laura Ingalls Wilder has a kind of starring role, although it's more accurate to say her father does. As charming and wonderful as the rest of the family were, the old man is and was a stinker the TV show chose not to feature. 

A third strand is drawn from Milt's Dutch Reformed pedigree, his faith, no matter what he thought of it or where it took him, and its practice. Fascinatingly, Howard traces his own Schaap genes back to the very heart of the afscheiden, the breakaway naysayer churches around Ulrum, the Netherlands took almost 200 years ago, a break engineered and celebrated by the loyal followers of what became, to many, a sect. That separatist undertaken created a legacy then shaped by the American experience of life on the unyielding land around the Leota, Minnesota. Milt is himself a victim of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, when things went under for him, making him feel himself to be a loser.

There's  more, I'm sure, but these are most of the majors with the exception of fishing, which becomes, in his son's retelling, the saving grace of his childhood and his father. Let me just say I've always been a fisherman wannabe, never really did much serious fishing, so all the technicalities Howard musters sort of miss me. What doesn't miss me, however, is the joy (and relief) that fishing brings to father and son. I don't think  you have to love fishing to love the book because Howard the Writer handles those scenes with such attention that the attention itself is convincing and compelling. Oh, yes, there's the totemic walleye glory that attends every day in the boat or on shore. Father and son are ever vigilant about the lord of the lakes, the walleye. They don't bite easily, but when they're landed, they're sacramental.

Most of the memoire features Milt's prolonged and painful stay at Mayo where the hospitals' legendary staff try their best to deal with a tough, tough patient and never quite do. That stay is a unifier, but it has its own powerful drama.

Every once in a while, you have to remind yourself that this is a memoire and not a novel because the story is told in such a seemingly imagined fashion. Milt Schaap is (or was) a real human being. His daughters are Howard's sisters; his wife is Howard's mom. There are moments in the story when you can only imagine being a fly on the wall listening his sisters reactions to what he's committed to the pages of this story. 

It's a really wonder-filled read that you want to--and some readers will--put down in places, not because it's boring (Howard's abilities as a writer are ever-evident), but because you just don't want to read what's almost inevitably coming.

Howard Schaap's Brooding Upon the Waters is really, really something. You won't put it down, even though you'll want to. Like I say, it's perfectly beautiful, but not at all pretty.