The Star Quilt Giveaway (ii)

Just a word or two on Sioux Star Quilts. They are themselves traditional, which makes the pattern within of significant value to the community. In other words, this table runner, all by its lonesome, carries great meaning to and in the tribe or band--and, at the moment I realized it was designated to be mine, I couldn't help thinking it was going to be carried on home by this white guy, which, to me, made no sense.

I was embarrassed--I was, honestly. I walked up to the front and was presented with the Star Quilt by Marcella herself, who wore a radiant smile. I actually thought of standing before the entire gathering and telling them I was very happy to be the recipient, but there had to be dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren who would undoubtedly value grandma's work more. She was a legend on the reservation. 

I started walking to the table in the back where I'd been sitting, then spotted one of Marcella's daughters at the end of the aisle. Behind me, the Giveaway was continuing. I stopped beside that daughter, held the quilt out before me, and told her that I thought one of Marcella's descendants would make a much better recipient. I was serious, and, besides, I thought I was being gracious; after all, I would have liked to take that Sioux Star home.

She made no motion toward the quilt, just bore down on me with her eyes and made it very clear to this non-Native that giving the quilt back was something of a profanation. It simply wasn't done. It would be a violation of an old and blessed ritual that Marcella herself had thought to adopt for this, her 99th birthday. The real value was in her giving, not my getting.

Marcella's daughter looked at me as if my pleading was not only mistaken, it was almost irreverant because the ritual had determined me to be the one who would take the table-runner home, not any of the others. If I gave it back, it would, in a sense, profane the ritual; and wouldn't it be just like some white guy to misread the whole idea of what was going on, what Marcella herself was up front doing right then, something akin to walking to the front of the church, picking up the bread and wine, and then giving it to someone else.

So the Sioux Star table runner is here now--tucked away somewhere in what few corners we have for "stuff in the basement," now that we've moved to senior housing. It's mine.

And so is its story. I just looked--it may be worth between $400 and $1500, but it's not on the market.

We have two children, one of whom lives here in Iowa, the other in Oklahoma. Neither of them have likely ever seen the Sioux Star table runner, nor could they know anything of its origins. Someday they will find it when rummaging through their parents' "stuff." (We have no basement.) 

I don't know what they'll do with it, but if it's worth a grand, I'm guessing they'll try sell it. 

I hope not.  

Look at it again up there at the top the page. It's beautiful.

I have no idea whether my children read these pages, but if they do, I hope they realize that this whole story--it took me two days to tell--is for them, in hopes they won't just let it go without gauging a sense of their father's joy--and pain. 

The Star Quilt Giveaway (i)

 Basement is a bit pejorative, I guess, isn't it? A basement is mostly storage space, maybe ping-pong or even a snooker table; but if it's living space it's often the habitat of a teenager who wants to create some distance from the rest of the family unit but can't afford to rent his or her own. Millions of basement rooms are luxurious, I'm sure, but still, if you ask someone where he or she is living nowadays and he or she says, "my parents' basement," they're only rarely bragging.

The title of this decades-old blog has always been "Stuff in the Basement," or, rather, Stuff in the Basement (I think I've been at it long enough to earn the italics). A thousand years ago, I thought it might be fun--for a while at least--to run through the "stuff" on my library shelves two houses ago, stuff I'd accumulated through the years and treasured enough to give a place in our home--and not just toss. We all have our mementos, right?  

If you could turn back the pages far enough--which you can't--you'd find me going on and on about "stuff," because there were so many things in that basement three houses ago, so many things that were there because they were worth more to me than they might well be to anyone else on the face of the earth, "stuff" whose stories I knew and wouldn't or couldn't forget.

Like that bright and beautiful quilted table runner up there at the top of the page created specially by a 99-year-old Lakota woman, along with a table full of other possessions, for a "giveaway" at her birthday, which I attended, having been invited. 

A "Giveaway" is a fine Lakota tradition passed on from the olden days, the idea being to make sure that the band doesn't develop pockets of the super rich. Giveaways happened for a variety of reasons, in this case a birthday; the idea was that my 99-year-old friend spend a ton of time getting ready, on her special day, to give away things she valued, not to "get" presents but to give them away.

A century ago, white folks squelched the ritual Giveaway, just like they outlawed the Sun Dance. It was, some believed, drawn from a pagan past and thus had to go. Native people were going to be Christians now after all, and farmers. The old ways had to die. 

Well, the old ways didn't, and there I was at a Giveaway, which resembled, for comparison, a raffle. Every last person at the party was given a number when we came in, and once the age-old ritual began, those numbers were called. 

For the record, I wasn't the only white guy at the birthday party, but I was most definitely a part of the minority. I wasn't interested in making a big deal out of being there and once the numbers started rolling out, I wanted to shrink away--this big old white guy for sure didn't want to have to walk up to the front to pick up whatever it was that might have drawn my number.

That gorgeous table runner was one of the most valued treasures--the biggest, as I remember, was an entire quilt. But when the star quilt table runner came up--was shown by the grandsons in the front, as if in an auction--and my number was called, I could have crawled into a hole. I won.

The people at the table where I was sitting, motioned for me to get up and walk to the front. 

[More tomorrow]

Epiphanies

In 1837 a caravan of covered wagons left Indiana for Iowa, which wasn’t Iowa at all back then, but still referred to as the Wisconsin Territory. Call it what you will, but what lay west of the Mississippi in the 1830s was wilderness. This trek was led by John Maulsby, a fearless pioneer who, according to his daughter’s memoir, loved the wilderness fiercely.

One of the wagons held the Westgates, although Mary Ann Maulsby claims she’s making up that name, not wanting to lay shadows over the path of his life. Westgate was a schoolteacher who had a vision, a great spiritual vision.

On that score, he wasn’t alone. Throughout the land, ordinary people had visions that grew out of what historians call the Second Great Awakening, a revival that brought forth a gaggle of home brews.

Professor Westgate believed the Lord had sent him to the wilderness, to the heathen, to preach the gospel of Christ. He was vision-bound to bring the Sauk, the Fox, the Kickapoo to the Lord.

It was a pact he’d made months back while praying over his sickly wife. He believed the good Lord had promised her recovery—she would become the woman he’d married once again—if only he would go out west and preach Jesus to the wilderness savages. That was the deal. I'm not sure it was written down, but it was believed.

Sadly enough, Mrs. Westgate passed away. Along the way, her condition slumped greatly. “Her face and limbs were so emaciated there was no flesh left on them,” Mary Ann Maulsby wrote, “and her eyes were glassy and held a strange expression.”

When Mrs. Westgate died, so too did her husband’s vision. Apparently, the deal was off. “They yoked their oxen to their wagons” in the morning, and “soon disappeared from our sight.”

I read that story just an hour or more before reading the wonderful old story of the Samaritan woman, a story most of us know well. What I hadn’t remembered of that mission saga was what happened after the she returned to her people to tell them what happened at the well. You can imagine her, wide-eyed, saying that this very strange Jewish prophet knew every secret there was to know about her life. “Could this be the Messiah?” she asks them (vs. 29). She can’t quite believe it herself.

No matter, at that point her people went wide-eyed too, I’m sure, and traveled back forthwith to hear the words of this odd Jewish prophet.

Now, the denouement of the story is something I’d forgotten completely:          

Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers.

They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.

I rather like the fact that the Samaritans needed some convincing.

Damascus-road experiences get all the ink. Paul become Saul in a blinding moment of divine insight. Many Christian believers mark the day on the calendar when they were saved. Praise Jesus.

But today I say, praise the Lord for the Samaritans. Things don't always happen in a wink and flash, some wide-eyed epiphany. “Because of his words,” the apostle John says, “many more became believers.”

They heard it for themselves. They listened. They believed.

Did the Lord come to Professor Westgate in a vision?

Maybe he did.

But in the wake of two decidedly different mission stories in this epiphany time is that He comes to us in His own ways, in his own time.  Some believe in an instant; some trek into a wilderness before he brings them on home.

He’s got His ways. He’s God. We aren’t.

Praise his holy name. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

'Selah"

 I’ve always been of the opinion that people who want to write—and recent surveys claim that nearly eighty percent of the American public would like to write a book someday—should take a few classes—a few, just a few.  One.  Maybe two.  Okay, if the instructor is good, three. 

 An honest appraisal is one good reason.  Most people believe that writing a book is something like biking—once you get the hang of it, you just do it.  All writers, novices and veterans, need an editor, need an honest appraisal. 

 Tricks are another.  A whole raft of little skills simply must be learned—what’s kosher and what’s not, how to punctuate dialogue, when to show and when to tell. 

The word “selah,” if I have it right, is something of a writing trick, like, well, white space.  In fiction especially, young writers need to figure out how and when to hit the enter key an extra time and use white space on a page, how to give the reader a break, direct him or her to the fact that there’s a scene change or an end to something.  White space is just as valuable as the right word because sometimes silence speaks volumes.  I don’t know if I’d call it a trick exactly, but making good, efficient use of white space is the kind of primary skill that can be taught.  So much about writing can’t.

Check it out.  If I fill this line with words, say anything at all, even if it has no meaning—let the apple core fall where it may—and then put in white space, you’ll see it.

 

 

As I was saying.  See what I mean.

There are “selahs” in this Psalm 32, two of them, in fact.  Twice David suggests white spaces, and one of them comes after verse seven, when David was extolling the beauty of Lord’s grace, a kind of perpetual surround-sound. 

 But “selah” suggests more than a scene change.  Here, as elsewhere in the psalm—and in the Psalms—“selah” seems to be a means by which the Psalmist demands contemplation, silence, even judgment.  “Selah,” here especially, seems to suggest that our best response to what’s been said is to meditate, to stop and think, something that’s increasingly not easy to do in our ever-connected world.

We’ve been with Psalm 32 for a long time already, but maybe our staying that long is only right.  David has been testifying to the single act that some say most distinguishes the Christian faith from the other great world religions—forgiveness.  He’s walked us through the lonely corridors of his own guilt to show us how leaving those close walls has made him, literally, a new man.  He’s celebrated the immense love of the Father, and made it clear to anyone who will listen that such forgiveness is not only readily available but vitally essential for a life of joy.

 And then there’s the line from which we’ve just come:  “you, O Lord, surround my life with music.”

 With that, we need a stop and think, stop and meditate—or so he suggests.  We need white space.  To get all of it in, we need silence because there are no words.

 Selahs are not sitting benches or free water bottles; they don’t just give us a chance to breath.  Here, David’s selah allows us to recognize the Spirit’s own breath within us.

 Be still and know that I am God.

 

 

Not easy to do.

Red Cloud's Prayer

 

I hope the Great Heavenly Father, who will look down upon us, will give all the tribes His blessing, that we may go forth in peace and live in peace all our days, and that He will look down upon our children and finally lift us far above this Earth. And that our Heavenly Father will look upon our children as His children, that all the tribes may be His children. And as we shake hands today upon this broad plain we may forever live in peace.

 Red Cloud, Ogallala Sioux

For the record, Red Cloud, a great Lakota Sioux Chief, went to Washington twice to negotiate treaties with President Grant himself. Unlike any other Native headman, Red Cloud led his warriors to victory over the colonizers, the white men moving into and through the upper Great Plains. In "Red Cloud's War (1866-1868)," he set his warriors out to cut off supply routes rather than attack the cavalry's forts themselves. He was a brilliant tactician, a battlefield general really, and a very good one.

But after 1868, the termination of Red Cloud's War and the withdrawal of fortifications throughout the region, he became a statesman and worked only for peace.

In the history of the region, Red Cloud earned his honored place as both a warrior and a peace-maker.  

"Writes dirty books"

A gang of guys are playing Rook in the dorm. I'm among 'em. The jabbering makes the game secondary. Mostly, we're just talking.

It's fall, 1966, sixty years ago, and I'm a freshman at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa, far, far from home. But friends aren't hard to come by when they all have similarly unreadable last names like "Schaap" and could sing more than one verse of "The Ninety-and-Nine." Like I said, we're playing Rook when some local guy mentions a name I'd never heard, "Feikema," even though it sounds pretty much like everyone else's.

"He's a writer," some other local kid says, "big guy--huge--writes dirty books." There's nothing accusatory about the way he says it. To me, he was marketing. "Changed his name. It's Manfred now."

"Naah," I say or something similar. "Gi'mee a break. This guy writes books, and he's from here?"

"Not Sioux Center--Doon," somebody says. 

I had no idea what a Doon was.

Some weeks later, in a bookstore in Wisconsin, I spot a paperback with the name "Frederick Manfred." If I hadn't had 75 cents along, I would have walked out of the store with the skinny thing stuck in my pants. Manfred was the Iowa guy, the one who writes dirty books.

I read The Secret Place cover to cover (175 pp), a rarity. I wasn't a reader, never was and, sure, the story had more than its share of sexual hijinks. The kid at the heart of the novel gets two girls pregnant, both out of wedlock, and this Manfred/Feikema guy brings us out into the country to watch.

But something happens. I get lost in the story, especially when the kid gets brought before the consistory--something in that scene especially smells familiar. He's writing on my ground somehow. I know this kind of story--about transgressions and consistories. Something I'd never, ever imagined happened before--I recognized the characters, recognized the world of The Secret Place (1965).

In point of fact, I was so moved by what I only vaguely understood--finding myself in what some call the "felt life" of the novel--that I went to my English prof to ask her if I could write my freshman English paper on a novel by this guy, this Frederick Manfred. I had to tread lightly, I knew, because those guys playing cards had said that somehow our feisty little college president, B J Haan, had seen to it that no one could check out Feike Feikema's books from the college library unless they had special dispensation. Dirty books after all--no pictures, but full-frontal nudity.

I told the teacher I owned my own copy of The Secret Place and she gave me the green light, so I wrote my term paper on Frederick Manfred's The Secret Place. That little novel made me think I maybe I could write too, tell stories. That Iowa novel, sixty years ago, set me off on a lifelong commitment to sit here and watch newly formed letters march over an empty page or screen. I've been at it pretty much ever since, devotionals for kids, novels, short stories, denominational history, family albums for the Back to God Hour, the CRC, and Rehoboth Christian Schools, innumerable personal essays, and today, somewhere close to a hundred podcasts.

In truth, it wasn't just The Secret Place that set me off on a writing journey, but when I look back at all those years of sitting here at the desk like I am right now--early, first light just now opening the sky--and this morning, like always, trying to get the words right, to create something somehow worth my time and yours, the first book I remember as central to that long story is a skinny novel by a local novelist, a dirty book, I guess, banned back then in the college library. 

With all the fuss here in Sioux Center about dirty books, I thought maybe my experience with dirty books might just have some relevance.

Just about then, there stood a sign on 75 that said something like "Doon, Iowa--home of Frederick Manfred. Just about then, after The Secret Place anyway, that sign mysteriously came down. 

But that's a story for another time.

Settlers Township 2006, at dawn

 I'm a slow learner.

It took me a couple of years to discover the bare, naked truth about photography--that it's all about light. When I got home on January 14, 2006, twenty years ago to the day, when I brought up the files I'd shot that early morning east of Canton in the hills along the Big Sioux, I knew when I got to this one was an epiphany. I hadn't really understood. This shot--someone's back yard in the dawn's early light, a Midas touch it gives to even a guy's backyard. 

Why shoot a fence post  and barbed wire? Because the lighting makes it interesting. Dawns themselves are beautiful, sure--but dawn is just as much a king for what it does to the things in its momentary orbit--"momentary" because what anyone who's ever taken the time to watch knows, won't be long and this bath of beauty will have vanished. 

Twenty years ago, by way of the Sioux County's most beautiful township, there was this recognition in me, something I'd never really understood before--that photography was all about light.

I never dreamed these photographs would get of my computer's memory, but here they are, not because they stop the show but because they're part of my an education that goes on yet today.

Like I said, I'm a slow learner.

One more thing. Here's another from that morning, not far from Inspiration Hills, just field grasses in a momentary shower of morning light.

I'd never done it before, but just this morning I asked AI to have a look at this one and make it pretty. Here's what AI did with this picture.

Amazing, isn't it? The power AI has is breathtaking. It's entirely understandable why people are at once both charmed and scared silly.

Here's what it did to the shot at the top of the page:

Then added: "The enhanced version is ready now — the golden light is richer, the mist softened, and the trees glow with warmth and depth. It feels like a peaceful invitation to linger in the quiet beauty of the moment. If you'd like, I can add a scripture, seasonal verse, or turn it into a greeting card or event backdrop."

Just amazing.

Twenty years ago in the Doon cemetery

[This post has been snatched from a longer introduction to a short story I wrote a decade or more ago, an intro from a collection of short fiction I've been working on, slowly, for years, a book of short fiction that features those stories as well as the stories that brought each of them to life--to answer questions like, "Why did you write that story?"] 

In January of 2006, on an icy cold Saturday morning I went out at dawn to get a a picture or two in a country graveyard. I headed out to Doon, where the cemetery hugs the rolling hills of the Rock River, a setting that offers a graveyard even more wordless gravitas. I can understand why Feike Feikema wanted to be buried there, looking down at his beloved Doon to the east, and across fields of corn and beans to the north, fields that, even in winter, don’t shed their spacious grandeur.

I wasn’t looking for Frederick Manfred's grave because I knew where to findit. It was cold—January—and I was looking for a shot that would feature the long shadows laid across stripes of snow and columns of stone by  the morning sun—just looking for something touching, to get something visually stunning.

That’s when I stumbled on the burial site of a woman whose story I would know absolutely nothing of if I’d never read the novel The Secret Place,  a novel I bought four decades before, a novel that changed my life.

I knew that good people felt used by that novel, even though the young woman buried beneath the marker where I stood probably suffered no abuse at all from Frederick Manfred, years later, when Manfred's novel was published. She was already here. She died in childbirth.

I met that woman, a prototype, in the pages of that novel. She died at just 21 years of age, the stone says, way back in 1920. But that morning, it seemed to me that I knew her, or at least of the woman beneath the stone; I couldn’t help wondering how many people on the face of the earth, even among her own descendants, had any inkling of her story.

“We shall meet again” the stone says, in mossy text.

I stood there beside her grave, sorry that she’d died so young, and sorry too that Feike Feikema caught all that rage from the town he loved when he was just trying to tell a story that was, in part, her story.

But I was also thankful for a story that made that very burial site alive with this even bigger story I’m telling, I guess, a sprawling story that will end only when the sun sets forever over the open spaces of a landscape Frederick Manfred loved and called Siouxland, a real tome that won’t be finished until the very last story of this broad land has finally been told.

There they were, in death, the two of them, the novelist who’d used her for a story that had changed my life, and the woman he’d used.

What would they say to each other? That's what I dreamed in "January Thaw,"
a story about stories.

You can read the story here.

Amazing Grace

It's a long story, but then most novels are. I  won't bore you with the background of Romey's Place; but I will say this: in it's first draft, that novel ended in a cemetery in the Netherlands, where the protagonist bawls in exasperation and anger at the grave of his father, who had suffered a massive heart attack, in Holland, a long distance from home. Romey's Place was no "feel good-er." It had been rejected by some of New York's finest, who were kind but unanimous in their assessment that it wasn't quite what their list was after. I was in a pickle unlike anything I'd ever been in.

I was in the Amsterdam for a three-week Dutch Semester through the college where I taught, and it was great. Loved it. I'd taken two books along to read because both were real winners with the evangelical world I was in at the time. One was A Vocabulary about Grace, by Kathleen Norris, whose personal story in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography attracted me--most of her life lived far, far away from her grandmother's place in far northwestern South Dakota. I read her Vocabulary in the Netherlands. Loved it, too.

The other was a book whose author I'd come to know personally but not well, a young-ish non-fiction writer who'd scored well with some other titles, but really hit the big time with What's So Amazing about Grace? Loved it, too. 

Those two books about grace were so convincing that when I left the Netherlands and came back home, I had determined the first draft's old cemetery climax missed the point because too much of Romey's Place was about grace, not rage. When I get back, I told myself, I was going to write that novel over again, changing to first person and dumping the Dutch graveyard. 

If you stay up on the evangelical news, you know where this is going.

Last week, Christianity Today announced what Philip Yancey--What's-so-Amazing-about Grace-Philip Yancey--asked them to, I'm sure. You can read there what both he and Janet, his wife, offer in explanation. It's news that soured hundreds of thousands of readers, like me, men and women who were wonderfully arrested by that book and the steady stream of more and similar headliners he's turned out since.  

Philip Yancey told me and others once upon a time that he was getting tired of doing the same thing over and over, regaling evangelicals for having lost its way, illustrating that very point with the heart-felt stories of Christians who haven't. If you're looking for a score, think of him this way: conservative in his appraisal of the basics of Christianity, but progressive with respect to contemporary issues. 

Yancey hails from a Southern family steeped in the world of Sunday school and Bible camps, a family that carried with it the notion that Martin Luther King was a political agitator and integration was not at all biblical. His own Damascus Road experiences had to do with walking away from the cultural values that still haunt America's evangelicals, especially its Southern crowd. I remember him confessing his frustration with writing books, one after another, that criticized sharply his most loyal readers. I remember him telling me he wished he could write fiction. 

I'm guessing, right now, some might well assume that all those books about grace were hollow because of his illicit relationship with a woman other than his wife, a woman who was herself married. 

The last time I saw him, he stopped me in the Denver airport, he and Janet on their way to some speaking engagement, if I remember correctly. But I can't say I knew him, knew the persona his work created for him, of course, but not him. I'm shocked and saddened by what happened, but--just shoot me!--much more sad about his Parkinson's, announced some time ago. 

I can't help but think of it this way: Phillip Yancey, a fallen servant of the Lord, knows better than most what's so amazing about grace. What he's forgotten, I'm sure a forgiving Lord will remind him in a way He likely hadn't before.

Tonight, at prayer time, I will remember him and Janet--and the others affected by his fall from grace.

Years ago--I think I was in college then--my mother called me and told me--tearfully, I remember--that a preacher in town had run off with the organist. It's a cliche, I know.

The thing was, this sinner wasn't our pastor. He preached at another church in town, not hers, not ours. I didn't even know the guy, and I'm not sure she did either. 

She cried, and when I asked her why, she just said for what his sin told the whole community of believers. For her, it was a disaster to see one of the righteous fall. She was right, I'm sure. 

But I will not forget that I have Philip Yancey to thank for teaching me more about what's so amazing about grace. I'm sure Philip can learn once again, as we all can and must.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

 “you will. . .surround me with songs of deliverance.”

 To my mother’s chagrin, I was never as talented as she was when it came to music.  She would have loved me—and her daughters—to be able to sit at the piano and create the joy she created right there all through her life. 

 But for me, no go.  She made sure I took lessons for years, but today I can’t plink out much more than “chopsticks.”

 Several years ago I wrote a play in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the college where I teach.  Somewhere in early summer of the year before, when I was belly-deep in the writing, I was struck with the notion that this play I was working on should end with music, a specific chorale anthem titled “O Lord God,” a Russian piece my sister used to sing adoringly, years after she’d left the college choir. 

I loved that anthem, not only because I knew it stayed so tenaciously with my sister, but also because I knew it had also been a favorite of college choirs throughout those fifty years. 

But I also loved it because the piece tells a musical story.  It begins in deep anxiety and begs the Lord to listen to her prayers, offered with daily diligence. And then, suddenly and remarkably, as if out of nowhere, the music’s trajectory simply soars in thanksgiving:  “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live.”  A real musician would know how to describe what happens technically, but it doesn’t take a professional to experience that, gloriously, the prayers of the petitioner have been answered. 

Because I wanted that music to end the play, I listened to it time and time again when I was writing, so often that today even a novice like me could direct it, I swear. 

At the college’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, the play was staged a half-dozen times.  I didn’t attend every performance, but I every time I was there I was moved as deeply as I ever had been at the deliverance story of “O Lord God.”

Many hymns are songs of deliverance, the Christian life beginning, or so it seems to me, in thanksgiving.  What happens in Psalm 32 is what happens in the lives of all believers:  once we come to know the miracle of grace, once our quaking bones have been delivered from the load of our sins and miseries, once we apprehend the love of God for his creations, we can’t help but sing, even the monotones among us. Grace makes our “chopsticks” sound like Bach.  Really, all our greatest hits are songs of deliverance.

I sat there in the blessedly darkened theater and cried three times, every time the play ended, cried at the incomprehensible clarity of music, something that can’t be explained really, but certainly can be experienced.  I’d try to tell you what exactly it is that the music adores, but I can’t.  There are no words.  The only way to hear it —and understand it—is music.

That’s why verse seven of Psalm 32 is such a wonderful line.  David makes a perfectly understandable claim here.  The story of his life isn’t over, but the victory has been won.  He’s sinned, he’s confessed, and he’s been forgiven. 

“You are my hiding place,” he says, my comfort and my joy; you are my habitation; you are where I live.  And you surround me—as if this whole world were the superb salesroom of some eternal electronics store—you surround me with songs of deliverance.  Not stories—songs.

 Wonderful.  Let the music begin. 

If you have four minutes, here's the hymn.

lThe Children's Blizzard --1/12/1888

Podcast? -- Listen here.

A January thaw is what all of us look forward to right now, a breath of warmth that reopens our hope that someday soon April will return, a day like Wednesday. What seems heavenly is, instead of cold-of-winter days, maybe three of forty degrees. And no wind.

Heaven comes to Siouxland.

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

Here’s how David Laskin describes that morning:

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

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

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

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

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

But there was promise here in Dakota.

Then came “the Children’s Blizzard.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Might. . .and Right

 “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world. . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

It's an amazing thing, really, how quickly our culture has transformed into  what it is today, under Trump, a culture that has bought into "the politics of power." That quote up there is from Stephen Miller, who is perhaps the foremost Trump advisor, a man who told CNN in an interview this week that some of us, at least, read or heard with unending chills. 

“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said, and he may be right about that. The truth is no one has said it openly for at least a century. Miller and Trump are bringing it back, in Venezuela most recently, Greenland next, then Cuba and Columbia and who knows how much more while we're at it, if their word is sound (that's questionable, of course). The entire population of Greenland, about 55,000 or so, aren't begging to come under the giant thumb of the King of the Big Macs, but that doesn't matter. Might makes right, and we've got the biggest and richest oligarchs in the world, and they'll sweep in and simply take over.

Manifest Destiny we once called an earlier version, when, post-Civil War, all that frontier land lay unoccupied from the Mississippi west. It was as if God almighty had determined it somehow impossible to imagine how the entire North American continent wasn't, well, ours because--do it yourself--just look at the continent--could it possibly not be that God intended it all to be ours?

And what could stop us from becoming what Stephen Miller would like us to be? Only an election defeat for the MAGA forces come November. And how will that change things? 

Try this: In a government in which Trump doesn't have ultimate might or weight or power, Congress will investigate whether Kristi Noem and the boss himself are right in their knee-jerk reaction to what happened yesterday in Minneapolis, that someone will bring them up for investigation for taking the life of this woman--

Renee Nicole Macklin Good, who was shot by an ICE agent as she drove her Honda Pilot down the street in front of her house. Noem--and Trump--called her "a domestic terrorist," an "agitator."

If MAGA goes down in November, someone or other will investigate the incident instead of making a snap judgment that appears to be contradicted by eye-witnesses as well as phone videos taken of the shooting, the murder. If MAGA goes down in November someone will determine what happened and whether all those little ships blasted out of the ocean were carrying fentanyl to our shores, or whether the entire Venezuelan enterprise wasn't really, from the get-go, about drugs, but oil.

Ours, Stephen Miller seems to say--our oil, and if you don't like it, I'll punch you in the face. Just remember--we got bigger guns. That's the rule of thumb now.

Nothing to do with Matthew 5. Nothing.

Where are we going?

To my knowledge, Stephanie Ruhle broke the story. 

That's silly language in the Trump era--as if anyone was needed to be the lead reporter concerning news made by our President, who makes his own news, really doesn't depend on anyone to get it from him, just spills it when and where he will.

But it was Stephanie Ruhle who was the first to get an admission from the King that he'd consulted the oil company muck-a-mucks before his Venezuelan adventure (it killed 60 or so military on loan from Cuba, I guess, but then that's not worth noting really, Cubans being commies).

He told the billionaire oil magnates among us, that he was going to pull of stunt that they needed to be ready for. Once it was over and all the troops were home and okay, he called them again. 

I don't know that there could be a more clearly outlined characterization of the Trump autocratic character. He did not talk to democracy's reps, the men and women we voted in to do the work of governing--none of them, either party; the people he talked to are the ones with the yachts, the filthy rich. 

He's not our President, he's their President. 

Why is that impossible to see?

Young Queen Victoria is a good movie, worth your time. It's set during the mid-19th century, of course, when the English aristocracy, and monarchy, was scared half to death of the bloody mess of the French Revolution, as well they should have been. The masses have every right to boil in anger when the power is not just primarily but overwhelmingly in the hands of its Elon Musks. 

True then, and true now.

Seriously, do we have to take Greenland before his cult signs off?

The Last Buffalo

Bierstadt, The Last Buffalo

[If you would prefer to listen to the podcast, click here.] 

"Now, boys, is our time for fun." That's what the hoity-toity artist said when he saw a herd of buffalo Comstock, the rancher, had spotted along the Republican River.

Albert Bierstadt was on his way back from California when he and the newspaper man traveling with him stopped at the Oak Grove Ranch and decided to try his hand--not at hunting buffalo but painting them. Comstock and his men armed themselves with rifles; Bierstadt packed brushes.

He wanted an angry bull, he said, "so mad that he'll bellow and tear up the ground," Bierstadt told Comstock.

That kind of rage would take some doing, Comstock thought, but he aimed to please the famous artist. He put Bierstadt and that easel of his up on a knoll high enough to see prairie Comstock was proud of, the land where he'd chosen to live.

Comstock said he and his son and a neighbor named Eubanks would create the scene Bierstadt wanted. He’d pick out a bull and wound him, get him hot-blooded.

All these years later, this whole business sounds beastly and wasteful; but it is, after all, 170 years later. Besides, this whole thing was being done in the cause of Art.

Eubanks shouldered his rifle from a draw near Bierstadt, should the beast decide not to sit still for the portrait. Once that bull was fierce, Comstock figured to steer him out toward that knoll where he'd attain eternal life as art. And it worked.

The buffalo spit and bellowed as predicted, and charged Comstock, who was aboard a horse so expert he could circle the bloody animal and still aim him toward the artist.

But the story goes that Comstock played it just a bit too close and got himself beside the buffalo where that bull couldn't see him. Just like that, that huge animal raised his shaggy head like a dying king and looked straight up the rise at the artist Alfred Bierstadt, then started pawing and snorting.

Bierstadt took off running faster than he ever thought he was able, and that insane bull made short work of the easel, then took off after the artist.

No one can prove this, but what Comstock claimed was that Bierstadt ran so fast his swallow-tail coat flowed out behind him so straight and hard the whole gang could have played a couple hands of euchre right there on the table that fancy coat became.

Finally, with that bull right there taking aim at that artist's behind, Eubanks’ rifle cracked and that animal fell in his tracks. For years, Comstock told people that the artist Alfred Bierstadt fell over, wiped out but saved from "a fearful death."

And that's the end of the Oak Creek Ranch part. But there's more.

In 1998, the U. S. Postal Service created commemorative stamps to celebrate American art. One featured a massive painting wide as the prairie by none other than Albert Bierstadt, The Last of the Buffalo. You may have seen the stamp.

And there's more. In 1897, that famous Bierstadt painting was put up for sale at the Chicago Exposition. It sold—now hold your breath--for $75,000.

You really ought to see it. No, it’s not Comstock riding the majestic white horse; it's something like a half-naked cigar-store Indian deliberately chosen and outfitted to make rich Easterner art buyers drool.

And if you get a chance to look close sometime, you'll see the landscape's not the prairie either. Siouxland has Spirit Mound, but otherwise nothing close to mountains like those in the background.

Now any art teacher will tell you that Albert Bierstadt knew how to paint sprawling American landscapes, and he also knew how to sell what he committed to canvas.

And what about Comstock, the rancher, you ask--that man never forgot the story, and was more than happy to tell it, the whole truth, right up to his grave. Well, maybe not the whole truth, either, you know?

That blasted January bustle

To be sure, it's not my favorite day of the year, ranks among the worst, in fact, although there are others upcoming, I'm sure, that will make me forget totally about the ratty jobs coming up soon and very soon.

When I walked past the tree just now, I couldn't help to realize that seasonal joy will once again be coming down, along with the nutcrackers on the corner table and even the baby tree I have here behind me in the office space. It's end-of-season today, now that New Years is new no more. No more Christmas carols either; our smart speaker stopped pouring out glee a week ago.

What sprang to mind just now, literally, was the first line of a much-beloved little poem from the magical mind of Emily Dickinson, who had very little to say about Christmas actually, but much to say about death. 

Goes like this:

The bustle in a house

the Morning after Death

Is solemnest of industries

Conducted upon Earth.

We bought a tree this year, from Hobby Lobby too (half-price!), so there'll be no dying in the our little retirement place once the bustle begins. In fact, the  most dreaded aspect of this year's post-yuletide clean up is where on earth we're going to put the tree--garage somewhere, I'm sure, but our new digs aren't spacious.

That the holidays themselves are over once again for another year carries its requisite sadness, but just as difficult, it seems, is this morning's concurrent realization that what lies before us and around us out here on the edge of the plains is three months, maybe even four, of winter. I feel like I should change the font on that last word or toss in a picture--all right, I will.

Of this--

If we could only control snow and ice as easily as you can with one of those darling little knick-knacks where all you do is turn the thing over and snow falls like grace, heavenly snow. But out here winter (!) doesn't work that way. Nothing comes in feathers. Snow comes sideways starting right about now and continues for a third of this new year--2026; and what I'm saying is that the bustle in this house on the day we take down Christmas is among the solemnest of industries we'll undertake all year. We ought to make it its own kind of holiday to keep the spirits up. 

Meanwhile, there's another verse worth repeating:

The Sweeping up the Heart

And putting Love away

We shall not want to use again

Until Eternity –

And that's depressing too, but eternity is pushing it, I think. Then, who am I to judge Emily Dickinson? Let's say it this way: 

The Sweeping up the Tree

And putting love away

We shall not want to use again

Until Next year, mid-December.

Maybe a day or two earlier.

It's not the same I know, but this Monday morning I can't help thinking it.

Sunday morning meds from Psalm 32

“You are my hiding place;

you will protect me from trouble.”

Edward Taylor, who lived from 1642 to 1729, was probably just an ordinary Puritan preacher. He lived about fifty miles west of Boston, in Westfield, Massachusetts, at a time when he—and many others—thought the way of life of Puritans was in immense and therefore perilous decline. Like other clergymen, he served his people’s physical needs as their physician, as well as their preacher. But I’m sure that in good Puritan fashion he railed on people for their sin.

Few would likely remember Edward Taylor at all today, but sometime in the 1930s, someone at Yale happened upon a sheaf of poems he’d written during his life in Westfield, 250 years before, the vast majority of those poems unpublished and likely unseen.

Weird, even bizarre, often shocking. That’s what students think when first they read Edward Taylor—and so did I. Let me edit a little—so do I. Taylor is given to the most outlandish metaphors—bodily parts and functions galore, just plain strange comparisons, odd ways of saying things—but always with respect to God’s amazing grace. He says divine things in sometimes outlandish ways, some of which you might rather not remember.

It’s Edward Taylor who I’m reminded of when I come to the second half of verse seven in Psalm 32, because, if we stop and think for a moment, we can’t help but be shocked at how greatly David has changed. The psalm begins in bone-chilling fear of the Lord. Just a few verses later, however, we’ve arrived safely “within his bosom,” as old preachers used to say. The Lord God almighty, once the source of horrific fear, has been, by his confession, suddenly transformed into a massive cushiony teddy-bear.

And that reminds me of Taylor’s Meditation 39 (First Series) which is a meditation on 1 John 2:1: “If any man sin, we have an advocate.” Our judge is God, the cosmic author of all law. We’re the perps, of course, and we, Taylor says, are guilty. But there’s a species of nepotism at work for us here, because Jesus Christ himself is our lawyer, and he’s our ace in the hole because he is, get this, the son of the judge.

Sounds like a set up, a divine kangaroo court. If we but ask the Lord to take our case, it’s case closed. That’s far more shocking than any Taylor metaphor, really.

“My case is bad, Lord, by my advocate,” Taylor says. “My sin is red; I’m under God’s arrest.” He asks the Lord to plead his case, then testifies what he knows from the passage in John: “Although it’s bad. thy plea will make it best.”

And then comes vintage Edward Taylor: “If thou wilt plead my case before the king,/I’ll wagon loads of love and glory bring.” I haven’t a clue what “wagon loads” has to do with the court system, but Edward Taylor wasn’t thinking about in creating great art—he simply wanted to testify to what he knew was forever true.

As does King David in Psalm 32. This shockingly blessed reversal—from mourning to dancing—is the inspiration for the poem. That which he feared now offers comfort; the Lord that scared him silly has become—viola!--a haven of peace. That’s weird, it’s bizarre, and eternally shocking. And he can’t help saying thanks.

And thanks is the reason both of them write songs—King David and Edward Taylor, each in his own peculiar fashion. And me, too. And you—or you probably wouldn’t be reading these words.

Thanksgiving is at the heart of things.

Truth be known, in my life I don't remember really raucous New Year's Eve parties. The  one I'll never forget is the very first one just six months after we were married. We were invited over to the home of a woman from a church we were attending. If I'm not mistaken, it was hardly Times Square. There were just three of us there--my wife and me and the hostess, who was only slightly older than we were at the time--maybe 30 or so. 

The transmission my memory sends me about that night has to be missing something--maybe another guest or two--but what is there in my mind is a bitching session when the hostess, after a drink our two, opened up about the lousy state of her marriage. We'd been married for only six months or so.

I wasn't thinking it was going to be some bacchanalia right there in the streets of the city. I honestly didn't imagine some hot party. I did expect some drinking, which wouldn't have been unusual, but may well have been unusual in volume. Instead, we got a sobering recitation of the woman's loveless marriage. 

We went home soon after twelve.

I should have guessed NYE was never going to be what its cooked up to be.

Number 53 is now history--no regrettable memories, but history will record one little detail that quite accurately summarizes our history of NYEs.

Barbara got the sweet idea that it might just be fun to have real champaign for once, so on NYE afternoon, she shuffled off to Wal Mart and lugged home a bottle, along with the prerequisite wine--we'd invited friends. 

Interestingly, two of the three couples who dropped by carried in their own bottle of the bubbly with the same motivations--they thought it might be fun to actually have champaign when the clock struck midnight. We giggled together because there stood three bottles of champaign on the buffet beside the wine.

One couple left before twelve, but two others made it to 2026, without much drinking, I should add. In fact, all three bottles of champaign stood right there, untouched, where they had when the party had begun. Okay, some wine was gone, but none of the true NYE fare had even been touched.

When the early-departing couple left, they took their bottle along, as did couple #2, which explains why the bottle my wife bought that afternoon is, as we speak, standing beside the milk in the fridge, still corked. 

A good time was had by all--don't get me wrong. But it warn't no blowout. 

NYE 2025 is in the books, memorable only for three graceful and untouched bottles of bubbly, who, if all goes well in 2026, may well show up again next year.

We're not getting old, we're there.