In praise of a place we called home (7)

 

Once upon a  time, i could walk to the Dunlop pond--it's in the neighborhood, and I'll miss it.

Sunday morning meds--from Psalm 42

“My tears have been my food day and night, 

while men say to me all day long, "Where is your God?"

 

When my alma mater called to ask if I’d be interested in leaving Arizona and coming back to Iowa, I never really considered not going.  I loved high school teaching because I loved high school kids; but I understood that if I were ever going to write, I’d have to teach in college, where there simply is more time.

 

Greenway High School was brand new, on the edge of a northern suburb of Phoenix.  I’d been hired precisely because I was a Christian.  I was also male, experienced, and newly outfitted with a masters degree; those were also factors.  But, illegal or not, I got the job on the basis of my faith.  The district interviewer, a man named Bill Sterrett, was a Christian too.  That’s another story.

           

Only two years later, a college teaching offer in my hand, I decided to leave.  When I told Mr. Sterrett, I got scorched.  He looked up from behind his desk and shook his head.  “Why would you want to go there?” he said.  “Everybody there is just like you.”  He slapped that desk lightly with his hand.  “Here, you’re really different.”

           

Mr. Sterrett died several years ago, but that line still reverberates through the echo chamber that is my soul because he was right.  We’re not talking about the difference between Vanity Fair and the Celestial City—there’s far too much manure in the air to make any heavenly claims about up here in Siouxland.

 

But living out my allotted years in a burgeoning new suburb of a huge metropolitan area would have made me a different person than spending those years in an ethnic conclave huddled against the winds on the edge of the Great Plains.  I chose the monastic life, and, as Frost would say, that choice has made all the difference.

 

I say all of that because in my many years here I’ve never been anywhere near someone who might say to me, sardonically, in my distress, “So, Jim, where the heck is your God?”  Hasn’t happened—and won’t.  I am surrounded by a cloud of believing witnesses. 

 

Had I stayed in urban, public education and American suburbia, I’d know people who would ask me the very question David that burns in his soul.  Some of them are still friends.  Last summer I got an email from an old teaching buddy, a “jack” Mormon, who wouldn’t let the silliness of my faith rest, in fact, because he’s quite adamant about not having any himself.

 

But I’ve been cloistered for fifty years here, and those few voices who might mock my faith are accessible only on-line.That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t hear those burning questions. They rise, instead, from inside me somewhere; and what I’m wondering this morning is this: if I’d have stayed in a more diverse neighborhood, would the voices I would have heard supplant the ones I now do, the ones from inside?  What would be the pitch of my own personal faith?

           

Those questions are here, even in the cloister, and they are packaged in the same taunting voice David heard. That voice I swear I hear, that burning question, even in a cloud of witnesses.

 

But I’m thankful, very thankful, that God almighty has given me, as he did David, a faith that won’t let me take those voices to heart, even though I hear ‘em. Only by grace, do I come anywhere near to having a faith that is equal to that task.   

In praise of a place we called home (6)

 We will miss winter too.

A stranger in the bushes

They say it all happened in the spring of 1864, Adair County, Iowa, somewhere near the river, the Middle River. the eastern part mostly, where mulberry bushes and other such got to be profuse back then, thick as a bramble mask. One hundred and more of the county’s finest men were somewhere below the Mason-Dixon, fighting beneath a Union flag. Up north there was an Indian war. The time and place was primed for dark and abundant fear, the kind that send people home to hole up.

That kind of fear grew out of depredations reported by pioneer farmers or their wives, who wandered out back in the face of dawn to tend the animals only to discover the animals required tending no more—bloody and slain by a monster who’d obviously ran them down before pouncing and ripping them apart hideously.

Farmers in Jefferson and Harrison townships warned others about the fearful slaughter, but this monster did his dastardly work at night, thus avoiding the pioneer farmers.  

The beast itself was first seen along the Middle River in Harrison Township, a harrowing sighting, people reported, because none of the witnesses had any idea what the animal could be exactly—big as a donkey, people said, red kind of, and behind him in a bloody wake far too many slaughtered cows and pigs.

For reasons known only to the beast, he rather quickly picked up his things and moved, now to Jefferson Township, where the depredations included colts, calves, sheep, and more hogs. The people of Adair County were daily more distressed.

Then, the first dramatic sighting: Womenfolk were out gathering gooseberries when they quite silently came upon the beast, sunning himself on the dead branch of a tree maybe twenty feet off the ground. At that moment, he offered one of the women the first glimpse during his stay in Adair County. She and the others retreated quickly, but the woman who laid eyes on the beast said only that the river monster was bigger than any dog she had ever seen

The men organized a hunting party to flush him out of his lair in the bushes, and they did—but he avoided their attempt to end his depredations. Eventually, he simply disappeared once more, but only after helping himself to forty pigs, some of which were 100 pounds.

Now listen to the end of the story in the history of Adair County. It’s too good not to quote:

After this he was seen no more, nor, we believe, heard from,

but the fear that he might be still lurking in the timber was for a long time the cause of alarm and annoyance and deprived the good people of Middle River country of many-a gooseberry pie. The animal was probably what is known as the American panther.

 They were likely right, but this “American panther” goes by as many as eighty names, the most familiar of which is, likely, puma or pooma or pyuma—all of which are acceptable pronunciation. Apparently, the American panther is not proud about what he’s called because he goes by jaguar and mountain lion and, literally, at least eighty other names. That’s right—8-0.

 Just once in a while—maybe once every dozen years or so, a mountain lion, a puma, a jaguar, finds their way into our world, wandering far, far away from home to scare the pants off of you or me or cousin Al, if Cousin Al doesn’t shoot him first.

 For the record, as far as I know, not a one has shown up in Harrison Township, Adair County, Iowa, either—not a one. But, then it’s likely nobody bakes gooseberry pies any more either. It’s a shame really.

 But every once in a while they do show up, usually young males looking for love; so, the next time you’re enjoying walking along a thick hedge, vigilance is nothing to sneeze at. 

  

In praise of a place we called home (5)

 Some skies and a couple of birds as we leave.

When?

 

“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.  

When can I go and meet with God?”

 

The Ghost Dance, one of the saddest religions of all time, was a frenetic hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation that swept Native life throughout the American west in the final years of the 19^th century. 

 Wovoka, a Piute holy man, saw the original vision, then designed the ritual from his own revelation. Erect a sapling in an open area, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, which was, back then, outlawed by reservation agents.  Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious, to witness to your humility. Often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness to their selflessness. 

 Then dance—women and men together—dance around that sapling, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude.  Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges.  Dance into frenzy.  Dance into religious ecstasy.

 If they would dance, Wovoka claimed Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering.  When he’d come, he’d bring the old ones with him, hence, “the Ghost Dance.”  The buffalo would return, and once again the people could take up their beloved way of life.  If they would dance, the dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, the white people.  If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, their thirst assuaged, their sadness comforted. 

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.”  

It was that simple and that compelling a vision. 

 As a white Christian, I am ashamed to admit that in the summer of 1890, the desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of a culture, created a religion that played a disturbing role in the massacre at Wounded Knee.

 It’s not hard to read the opening two verses of Psalm 42 if we’ve never felt the thirst David is talking about. But it’s helpful for me, a white Christian, to know the story of the Ghost Dance, to understand how thirstily Native people looked to a God who had seemingly left them behind. They were dying, spiritually and physically. 

That’s why the thirsty four-leggeds here would make sense to Native people—why, back then, they would have understood the opening bars of David’s song. 

 What’s at the bottom of this lament is nothing less than God’s apparent absence. 

Trev and Trump

So today is the opening of March Madness. May the best bunch of guys--and women--dangle the nets from around their necks come the glorious end. Lots of good tv a'comin'.

I'm reminded of a story from my coaching days, long, long ago. Once upon a time I was a freshman team coach at Greenway High School, Phoenix, Arizona, during a long winter season that coached me to see that my joy was in the classroom, not on a gym floor. 

Freshman basketball at Greenway meant two teams--A and B. It was never said publicly, but the truth is that the A team contained most of the kids the head coach thought had a future as a varsity Demon (nickname, of course), which left the B coach--me--with the others, which would have been unfair had not all the rest of the schools in the district done something similar. 

Thus, when we'd play Thunderbird High School, just down the road, we'd travel together, one team taking the court before the other. We lost--a lot too, but then the A team wasn't a whole lot better. 

Trev was Trumpian in arrogance, a real cookie who had to be ridden like a ill-tempered mule. He was talented on the floor, as long as he was out there, but often as not he was beside me on the bench because he had issues, as they say.

I once called his father to enlist him in the quest to temper the tantrums, but he backed off. "I haven't been able to handle Trev for the last several years," he said. "Good luck."

Something about the kid drove me nuts; something about him was charming--and a challenge. 

But here's the deal. We were playing away from home one afternoon, some other high school, when the squirrelly ref blew his whistle, stopped things on the floor and threw up his hand. "On 44," he said, or whatever and pushed his hands out as if it were pass interference. Trev blew up, claimed he'd never touched the guy, screamed bloody murder, which drew a technical.

I called the ref over. Now you've got to see us--it's a freshman team, late afternoon in the city. Maybe a half-dozen people in the stands. What I'm saying is there's no big crowd protest.

I call the ref over, tell him my Trev didn't push theirs.

"I don't care," the ref says. "I don't like his looks."

"You can't slap a foul on the kid because you don't like his looks," I said.

That went nowhere.  Trev had a foul and a tech, and I don't remember if  he stayed long in the game.

March madness wasn't what got me to thinking about Trev, Trump did. On the sly, his government thugs rounded up a ton of Venezuelans--does anyone know they are--wrestles them to the ground, shaves their heads, clothes them in t-shirts, and hustles them off to El Salvador, where Trump has assurances that the crook in charge of the government there says they'll be taken care of, then points at  some kind of hellish penetentiary. The government has nothing on these men. They just didn't like their looks.

These Venezuelan hombres may well have been gang members, may well have required deportation, but in this country, just like on  the basketball floor, there has to be cause.

As the judge told the administration, "Prove it."

That's the American way.   

In praise of a Place we called home (4)

 A neighbor had an extra lot. Neither Barbara or I were ever the kind of people who fashioned a dream home, but suddenly we building it, out in the country.

JOIN THE RESISTANCE!

A friend of mine, Dave Schelhaas, got pummeled by MAGA troops in the neighborhood--they're the majority, by far--when he published an essay that took on the king. The newspaper stepped in to edit out gross responses.

That's what many in the minority don't want to happen--they don't want to get incinerated by the royal right, the MAGA crowd, who will stop at almost nothing to protect their investment in a man who doesn't deserve their favor.

I put a note up on Facebook to JOIN THE RESISTANCE, urging readers to buy and wear Canada t-shirts. 

No single mess that the King of Messes has begun is more horrifying than his saber-rattling at our northern neighbors. Are there MAGA supporters who think, really, that what he's doing with regard to Canada is just or sane?

Here in the states and maybe especially here in  Siouxland, wearing Canada's maple leaf unequivocally identifies you with the loyal opposition, the American Resistance. 

In praise of a place we called home(3)

 

We were in the country all right, with a real live river for a neighbor, a famous one, named after the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die, the Floyd.

A river with its own  inhabitants.

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 42

“As the deer pants for streams of water,

so my soul pants for you, O God.”

I’m not sure what I’m about to say is instructive or merely sensational, but one can die from thirst in four days, even if all you’re doing is praying.

At the end of my career, classrooms were strewn with water jugs in all shapes and sizes, some monstrous. Students toted them everywhere. Even in church, in the middle of a sermon, millennials of all ages take out bottle and grab a swig as if the numbers on their internal clocks tick dangerously close to 92 hours. I just don’t get it—but I’m not of their generation.

I’m guessing none of us—the heavy drinkers included—know the extremity of the opening line of Psalm 42, but then neither do I. I can’t remember a time in my life when. . .

Wait a minute. I used to bale hay. Just about every memory haying is in the barn, where, by noon, temperatures would soar in dusty, cob-webbed corners of ancient hay mows.

Today, close to sixty years later, I start buying lemonade come June. Often, I chug it, even though I haven’t bucked a bale in half a century. I remember baling hay whenever I drink lemonade. I remember slipping wet quart jars out of insulated paper bags, screeching off lids, and chugging cold lemonade right through a dozen ice cubes.

Still, only a few of us know the extremity of the simile here—of thirst that rages into outright panting. And I’m not among them. I’ll never forget pouring down ice cold lemonade in a hay mow, but I was nowhere near dying, even though at twelve I may have thought so and probably acted like it.

We don’t know that David wrote Psalm 42, but some believe he did; what’s more, some like to think he wrote it when his son, Absalom, was threatening his father’s life. Whether or not that’s true, the heft of the psalm’s opening simile has little to do with our not packing a thermos. Water jugs have nothing to do with Psalm 42.

What David is saying—if indeed he is the author—is that he passionately thirsts after God because God seems nowhere to be found. That’s the kind of thirst at issue.

On a particularly dark day for us not all that long ago, we took a walk around town. When we passed some houses of people we knew, I couldn’t help but recount the troubles each of those families were going through too. Maybe it was my problems that made me calculate tribulations—I don’t know. But I did, sadly. Racked up other people’s problems as if to take the edge off mine perhaps.

I’d just read a little from Calvin, specifically a line in Book I of the Institutes: “Without certainty of God’s providence life would be unbearable.”

Certainty is one fine blessing, but not everyone gets it. That night, I was a lot less confident than Calvin.

Psalm 42, long a favorite of many, is all about chugging certainty even in desperation, about knowing God is there, even when we’re sure as heck he’s not. That wonderful passage from Isaiah is a heavenly promise; the story from Acts does nothing but bring smiles. But Psalm 42 is the gut-wrenching plea of a man who finds himself without.

The thirst here is for nothing in a jug, for something a whole lot more than lemonade. The thirst here is for living water in the parched soul of someone who’s wandering in a desert where there’s nothing more than hot sand.

A lot of folks know that thirst, even David the King, David the poet, David the man closest to God’s own heart. Even he knew what it meant to pant.

It’s always nice to remember we aren’t alone, isn’t it? It seems to me that’s the blessing of Psalm 42.

In praise of a place we called home (2)

We'd come to reside in the country, where the bountiful skies spread themselves out for miles in all directions. 

Backyard dawns, 2012

In praise of a place we called home (1 )

The Miedema farm

There is a season for everything, the Bible says, so it's time to look back. We're moving--in a sense, we're going home to the prairie town where we lived for better than forty years. But we're also leaving a place that was farther into the country. When the two of us were 65, we sold our house and rented this lovely old country house, got it for a steal when the owner out in Denver wanted it occupied but couldn't find renters. We signed on. 

I remember coming down the hill east of Orange City, descending gracefully into the valley of the Floyd River, and telling myself that if Barbara and I could live out here for 15 years, that would be just fine.

We didn't make it, but we did make thirteen, which ain't bad.

We're leaving a house we built, but even more, we're leaving the country. So I'll be posting pictures with images I hate to leave behind. 

It took me only a few mornings here, at the Miedema place, to realize we were being gifted nothing more or less than beauty. 

This is what we found just outside our back door, thirteen years ago. This is the place we're leaving.

One morning, backyard

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 29

 

 “and in his temple, all cry ‘Glory.’” Psalm 29:9

Psalm 29 is just about perfect for the Mesowe Apostles, an indigenous African Christian group who worship in the grand open spaces of Northern and Central Africa.  In fact, if you visualize the psalm—if you see it as David sings—what you see is a broad plain, a veld, a place so open only God can inhabit the emptiness. In this vast amphitheater, David says, the voice of the Lord has spoken in spectacle:  trees blasted, mountains moved, deserts swept, forests laid bare. 

Then suddenly, shockingly, instead of being outside, we’re not:  “and in his temple, all cry ‘Glory.’”  That’s disappointing.  I thought we were watching this from a place like the Grand Canyon.  Suddenly, we’re in church.  Well, maybe an IMAX theater. 

 I’ll tell you how I’d like to interpret this—I’d like to believe that David is saying that all-of-this-world is God’s temple, that his Lord can’t be confined to four walls, that creation itself is his eternal dwelling.  That’s what I wish he meant. The world is God’s holy temple. I feel that every dawn I spend in open country.

But that idea is tough to believe because I know the David wanted, more than anything, to build God’s own house with his own hands.  I also know he didn’t get the job because those very hands were bloody, too bloody.  I know no one treasured “the temple” more than King David. It’s difficult to imagine his using the word as a metaphor.

 So how can I explain my being let down by this abrupt shift in point of view?—outside, one minute, in some vast natural amphitheater; to inside the next, and on our knees. 

Maybe the spectacle of temple worship for David was a whole different experience than what church-going is to me.  With all those buckets of flung blood, maybe it meant more to David than “church” does to me.

Maybe the point of view hasn’t changed.  Maybe King David out there with his friends, shuddering at God’s thundering voice, then panning north or south or east—whatever direction—to the temple, where God’s people are down on their knees.  “See that,” he says, “all the people cry ‘Glory.’  Psalm 29 is, after all, a poem for kings.  Maybe the temple’s radiant and joyful offerings are but another point in the sermon.

But then, maybe it’s me and not the psalm.  Maybe I too should be hearing God’s voice as deeply in the temple, in my church, as I do beneath the dome of his sky. 

Maybe I should be more like David.  We go and have for years and years, most often twice. But there are times I feel God’s presence more definitively at a sunset on the banks of the Big Sioux River.

 But then, maybe what I’d like to read into this particular verse—that creation itself is God’s great temple—is what is really there, even if David didn’t think that way himself.  In fact, it’s a given:  his words, scribbled down under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit, transcend what he was thinking.  With divine prescience, maybe he saw the whole unmistakable truth, even if he didn’t recognize it himself.

 God reigns. I’d like to go to Africa, just to see the Mesowe apostles—hundreds of them, millions, at worship in the temple of the outdoors.  God reigns over forests and mountains and Great Plains. His kingdom stands wherever dawn lights the sky. He is worshipped in that temple whenever and wherever his voice is clearly heard. Just listen, David is telling his royal friends. Just listen.

Then get down on your knees and sing, “Glory.” 

Seems to me that’s the word of the Lord.         

A City on the Plains -- Small Wonders

When the first three white men to come to Lyon County, Iowa, showed up, the plot of land as far north and west as you can put your finger on in the state, they were looking for beaver and deer and whatever else they could find to trap and shoot and eat. We’d call them “mountain men,” I don’t remember seeing any mountains in far northwest Iowa—gorgeous hills run up by the Big Sioux River, beautiful land as far as you can see, but no mountains.

For the record, Mssrs. McGregor, Lockhart, and Clark were their names, although Mister George Clark was no shirttail relative of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. George Clark was among the first white men to set foot on the far corner of our fair state, but he didn’t fare well here—he was drowned in March of 1863, when the Big Sioux had one of its frequent flooding fits.

Mr. Clark was, however, preceded in death by Mr. Lockhart, who took an arrow from a band of Dakota who were 80 miles away from the Minnesota River valley where their kinsmen determined not to take the abuse they were suffering and rose up to begin the 1862 war. The arrow that Mr. Clark took was a glowing ember from a far bigger fire.

That left McGregor, who found himself quite alone in a desolate prairie, where he didn’t trust bands of Injuns (his word) coming by. McGregor picked up his arms and trotted back east with enough tales to enchant any barroom gang.

Those three men might well have found as many as 76 stone circles and dozens of mounds along the Big Sioux, odd protrusions of the earth, different sizes and shapes, a whole acre of honor they could have guessed had to be left behind by some long gone marauding savages—"one huge Injun’ cemetery maybe,” they might have surmised. Their surmising would have been right.

In, say, 1725, a century before those mountain men were here, they would have had to go 1500 miles east to Boston, to find as big a city as the one that once existed right there where these three tough guys stood, just south and east of Sioux Falls, SD, which was back then an interminable sea of tall grass. As many as 5000 people (researchers call them Oneida people) lived on the dusty pathways of the city. Five thousand residents doesn’t seem like overpopulation, but New York was New Amsterdam back then; Chicago wasn’t even there when this city of indigenous people was thriving.

It seems impossible that about the time when wave after wave of immigrant Englishmen and women were stepping down on Plymouth Rock, this city, people have taken to call Blood Run, was pulsating with

life and trade. 

South Dakota has done a wonderful job of celebrating the once-here thriving city of Blood Run. Just follow the signs to The Good Earth State Park, where pleasant and informative Visitor’s Center tells what can be told, what can be explained about the Onieda people—some Sac and Fox, some Sioux and Omaha, some Ojibwe. And take the kids—there’s all kinds of interactive things that’ll catch their attention.

The city of Blood Run was down the steep hill and across the river from the park, in a place we call today, Iowa. If you’re from Dakota, you have every reason to be proud of the way the state has honored what once stood just across the Big Sioux.

But if, like me, you’re an Iowan, you’ll be disappointed, even embarrassed to discover that across the river, where once so very long ago a city of 5000, give or take a couple hundred, stood a city bigger than almost city in North America.

And there’s nothing there because decades of King Corn has flattened the mounds and filled the empty spaces. And there’s nothing there because Iowa, dragging its harrowing feet, really needs to do more than McGreegor, Lockhart, and Clark.

Blood Run is a gorgeous, haunted place, unlike any anywhere near