The powerful impact of nature on your health*

How time spent in nature can improve your health

The average adult spends more than 90 precent of their day inside, away from nature, and that's affecting their well-being.

The benefits of nature on your mental health.

The outdoors especially benefit those with:

--ADHD. Research suggests that outdoor activity reduces ADHD symptoms in children.

--PTSD. Nature-based thereapies have become increasiingly common for the treatment of PTSD veterans.

--Stress, anxiety and depression. Nature exposure reduces the symptoms of these conditions by regulating the sympathetic nervous system. 

The benefits of nature on your physical health

Studies have shown that nature exposure

--Improves immune system function through increased exposure to vitamin D and organic compounds that boost the human immune system.

--Decreases blood pressure levels.

--Regulates circadian rhythm, which helps you sleep better.

--Increases the length and intensiity of physical activity.

What counts as nature

Any outdoor green space counts. This can be your backyard, a park, walking trail, or the golf course.

And if you can't get outside, even listening to nature sounds like waves, thunderstorms or bird calls can help you reap the mental and physical benefits of nature.

______________________________________

*Text is taken from a Wellmark advertisement brochure. The images are my own.

The Restless Traveler ii

Continued from yesterday, a short essay attributed to me but long ago out of my computer. A Canadian grad student studying the occupation of the Netherlands, asked me for the proper bibliographical data, which I don't have. I remember the incident he described, but I have no copy of any essay I might have written. 

He sent me the essay. I knew it was a piece I wrote, but I hadn't seen for 16 years.  

Yesterday I passed along the first half. Here's the second. What I remembered was the restless traveler's discomfort at the comportment of the man who told the story of the Dakota's attack on his hometown, New Ulm, Minnesota--just the way he told the story, just his demeanor. It was reminiscent of the way the German occupiers acted/spoke/behaved. He couldn't handle it.

___________________ 

Achingly, painfully tethered. By choice, right then, he would have deserted the whole bus if he could avoid pain that was closing in on him—ancient, deadly fears long ago thought put to rest, but suddenly awakened by tone and rhetoric and ethnic pride.

When we got out of the bus at the college chapel, I could see he was not to be reasoned with. Some spirit in him was out of control—and he knew it too.

“When we arrived at this most beautiful Lutheran chapel,” he wrote, “I made sure to stay in the back on a church bench, so I could escape the professor’s diatribe attack on my senses. I fretted about myself—within my own, why I do not have more patience.”

And then, “Finally he stopped talking,” the Dutchman wrote.

The retired prof had stopped because we'd entered the Martin Luther College chapel, where, serendipitously, which is to say, providentially, the college’s own fine organist just happened to show up. That man opened up that new huge organ in a fashion that no guitar and drum set can ever do. Together, we sang old hymns, even “A Mighty Fortress,” Luther’s own. It was a blessing I have not the words to describe.

But our war survivor tries—listen:

“Then the college organist played this beautiful very large pipe organ, with songs so wonderful. Peace came in my heart, and I thanked God for his patience with me, being a ‘Restless Traveler.’ Those familiar songs released my anxiety,” he wrote.

Those old hymns of faith were decidedly providential therapy. What he required at that point—and he understood it himself—was therapy.

That retired history prof never wore the black SS coat and had nothing to do with The Final Solution. He was an American, doing what lots of us do—taking pride in his heritage, including the town’s own history, which started a full century before a little madman with a paintbrush mustache.

But there’s a little more to the story of our restless traveler.

Henceforth we were transported to the Shell Brewery, where, following a short tour, we were led thirstily to their tasting room for some product research.

“We were invited to taste small amounts of different types of beer,” our restless traveler wrote, quelling, for a moment at least, his old fears and hatred. “It tasted good and put me in a mood to sing a song, song from my younger days—not quite proper for elderly Christian persons perhaps, but seemed funny.”

There’s nothing like a little sip to help you forget, maybe, eh?

But the charmer was the evening, when, accompanying some fine German drinking songs, a motley crew of masked intruders, the Naaren, ended our German dinner by pulling every last one of the weary travelers from their chairs and waltzing them into a series of hoopla dances and marches that would have sent all of our travelers reeling had they carted in a keg or two with them. Which they hadn’t, thank goodness.

Here's the way the Dutchman described the hijinks:

“A dozen characters, men and women, although whether man and woman was difficult to distinguish, were wearing wetween our dinner tables, encouraging us to join. It took me a while before I was reaooden masks and colorful costumes. They entered the hall dancing, and hobbled bdy to accept their invitation, until I secured a woman who was a good dancer. I managed to get a hold of her. Her mask was not as scary as the other ones. When the music stopped, she gave me a compliment about my dancing. It made my day.”

It made his day.

And thus, presumably, our restless traveler, so psychically stricken earlier in the day, was comforted finally, by the great hymns of the church, a few sips of good stout German beer, and a sporty jaunt with a masked intruder—a woman he managed to get hold of, he says, who then told him that for an old guy with a wooden leg, he was, by cracky, one heckuva good dancer.

That's the whole story. Let preachers of all types and persuasions do with it what they will. All I know is, that’s the way I saw it, and the way he tells it.

There’s got to be a sermon there, if we have ears.

"The Restless Traveler"

A grad student in Alberta sent me a note to ask if I could tell him where a little essay had appeared so he could include it in a bibliography. I looked, but couldn't find it. But I told him I recognized the events and specifics; I told him I remembered the original story, but I had no idea where it could be found. It was titled, the grad student told me, "The Restless Traveler." I couldn't find it, so he sent me a copy.

It's mine all right, but my guess is our restless traveler himself  picked it up in 2010 or so from this blog.

Here 'tis. And here, I think, is the man who used the essay, the interesting guy whose war memories came flooding back when he listened to a man explaining, the story of the 1862 Dakota War. It's a story I told and will never forget.

The man at the center of the photo, I think, is our restless traveler.

Somehow, I think I knew what was going on, in part, I think, because I knew the man, his history, and the sometimes stinging effects of childhood experience. He’d immigrated to Canada after the war, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and not all of that experience—hiding from conscription, living in fear day and night, the hunger winter—not all of that simply sifts out of one’s life when it's left behind. If there are jackboots on the necks of your neighbors, you don’t walk away whistling.

What happened was a kindly old retired professor walked up on the steps of the tour bus and began to tell the peculiarly German story of New Ulm, Minnesota, a town that celebrates its heritage of sauerbraten, schweinhocks, and polka bands. In his defense, the old prof was German-American, not German. In all likelihood, he spent the early 40s here in the States, picking ripened milkweed pods for parachute silk in the U.S. war effort, no more a Nazi than any of the other seniors on the tour bus.

No matter. Once he started talking—even though he spoke English with no accent—he was unapologetically German; after all, his chamber-of-commerce job was to sell the town, which means to sell the local, proud German heritage. And our tourist, the man who couldn’t forget the Nazis’ snarls in his boyhood backyard, got what the Dutch might call “benauwd,” so breathtakingly claustrophobic that he literally couldn’t stand it. He couldn't listen.

This 80+ year-old war survivor had distinguished himself already as someone who could be strong-willed, to say the least. He was, after all, a man who'd climbed the Himalayas—he warn't no marshmallow. And he’d lost a leg in an biking accident—he hobbled demonstrably, but never complained.

In just two days, he'd distinguished himself clearly, so when we noticed that something was decidedly wrong with him, he was moping sort of publicly, initially at least, we rolled our eyes. But my suspicions weren’t far afield.

Here’s what he wrote in a little summary he penned of his experience on our Minnesota bus tour:

“Memories popped up about the Second World War, when German soldiers occupied Holland—us. Then when someone was going to give me a small sticker to put on my chest, it bothered me. I left the room to go outside. There was something that disturbed me, my memory in the past, when the Jews had to wear armbands with the name ‘Jew,’ to separate them from (us) whom they considered other (Germanic) Dutch people.”

I guessed it was a version of post-survival stress. Something in the kindly old professor’s mannerisms, his tone, his story, his telling of it, something in that little tourist sticker unearthed memories our own “restless traveler” might well have thought buried, and he nearly fell apart.

“He was very knowledgeable and could not stop telling his stories about German history and Indian wars,” he wrote. “He spoke while the bus drove around, to our next stop. I fretted, but I could not get out of the bus; he was driving me up the wall. I was stuck in the back of the bus and could not escape him.”

_______________

Tomorrow: the rest of the story of the "Restless Traveler."

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “Then I acknowledged my sin to you 

and did not cover up my iniquity.”

A woman came up to me at a conference and told me how much she’d enjoyed reading a novel of mine titled Touches the Sky.  I’m thankful for any readers, but the ones who sing praises bring real delight.  It’s an ego thing.

“The last chapter,” she told me, “—when I finished it, I cried.”

I can’t tell you how much that comment meant because the most indelible memory I have of having written that novel is the moment of its completion.  I’d never felt exactly that way about anything I’d written, but when I finished the final chapter and wrote those last words—“please do, please do,” I was struck with the feeling that I had poured every last ounce of who I am into those final pages..

It’s embarrassing, in a way, to say that.  The person you might meet on the street—the man you speak to when you talk to me—is not so much the human being he is as the man you hear in the words of that final chapter.  It’s scary to say that.

I used to tell my students that writers need to be flashers, willing to don and doff raincoats.  It’s a lousy metaphor, but it gets their attention—and it’s not all wrong.

Getting naked isn’t easy.  Physically, it is easy to some people—hence nudism.  But metaphorically, it isn’t easy; even those who may well consider themselves most transparent can engineer pseudo-openness to cover their own precious nakedness.  

I’m not sure any of us really knows much about our nakedness because not many of us really know who we are.  Some of us know we belong, body and soul, to our faithful Savior; that’s an identity, a real identity.  But who, really, are we?  Who am I?  That’s an essay question requiring a lifetime—actually, more—to write fully.

When David retells the story he’s singing in Psalm 32, and when he gets to very heart of the action—“I acknowledge my sin and dropped the cover-up”—it’s amazing, isn’t it, to know that literally there was no cover up in the first place?  Before God almighty, there are no flashers. There was nothing about the sordid Bathsheeba affair that God didn’t know—not the adultery or the premeditated murder of her husband Uriah.  God saw it all.  There were no secrets. Buck naked, 24/7.  

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fascination with secret sin is fascinating in itself, but, in a way, silly because God is not a TV detective.  He doesn’t need clues or even confessions to know what happened.  He knows where we’ve been, who we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we think of what’s happened.  Before his face, there are no secrets.

The really painful part of our coming to Him in confession is the injury, the pain which accrues when our precious will shatters like our pride, when we come to know we can’t do it on our own, when we learn we must crawl or be dragged before him.  

When we give up, he smiles and nods and heals. When we come before him naked, he gives us a whole new wardrobe. What he wants, simply, is our human pride buckled before him. We have to get naked, even if there are no cover-ups.

That’s the song David is singing in Psalm 32.  

September 2009, McNally, IA

 

Warriors, 1972

Once upon a time, I had a copy of this high school annual--owned it, in fact, considered it one of my proud possessions because it legitimizes my claim that I spent two years of my life in the southwest corner of the state of Wisconsin teaching rural kids, several of them from family-owned and run cheesemakers, two great years, two years that did more to make me grow up than the four precious previous years, in college. 

It's fair to say I did well, probably exceeded my own expectations. Right from the beginning, I wanted to go to graduate school, so I lasted only two years at Black Hawk, two really good years.

 My boss that second year told me if I ever wanted another high school job, all I had to do was show this page from the '72 annual to whatever administrator was hiring. Two years and a masters later, I did and it worked. He was right.

Very faintly across the page is something written with a pen, barely discernable words--they happen to be mine. The owner of the old book must have asked to have me sign it--lots of kids did. Signing yearbooks was a big deal at Black Hawk back then. It's almost impossible to read what I wrote, but trust me, I'm thanking him, at first tongue-in-cheek but by the end very sincerely for what he'd done--and there's something mentioned about plays. I was the 11 and 12 English teacher, freshman bb coach, and play director. I also had the student paper. If I'd been married, I'd have been divorced. 

Those great years were also almost insufferable: loneliness was a monster.

But that faint scribbled note, teacher to graduate, suggests that the image doesn't come from my Black Hawk '72 annual, but his. And it does.

Two days ago we picked a monster of a package out of the mailbox's oversized bin--huge thing that cost $25 to send. It came from the kid (no longer a kid but long ago retired, he told me) who sent me a museum's worth of things about the kids (long ago retired too) from BHHS, class of 1972. 

What a wonderful gift--he even sent return postage.

Out of nowhere really, a pile of memorabilia descends on our place out here 500 miles due west.

He says the class of 1972 heard about a flood at our place last year, a flood that took a ton of stuff along when it inched back out of our bottom floor, including my Blackhawk memorabilia (like the BHHS '72 annual). 

He'd like his returned, the one at the top of the page, and that's good. 

But for a couple of days this week, I had a ball looking through all kinds of things about BHHS '72, thinking back to a time in my life that spills over with memories of me and them--all of us--growing up.

The guy who assembled and sent the museum is here in this pictre--back row, sixth from right, tall and thin, bespectacled. From all that's written here in his album, to him and about him, a kid (back then) who could have taken this high school annual, full of sweet notes, with him to job interviews--that kind of nice guy.

Trust me on that. Trust all the grads who signed his high school annual.

Anyway, Jeff, this is just to say, thanks one more time, 54 years later.

A Holy Place

 

If I wouldn't have had a guide, if I wouldn't have known ahead of time that the Sioux quartzite out there was full of ancient etchings, I swear I could easily have missed them, even though I walked right over them. Of course, I visited the Jeffers Petroglyphs in the middle of the day, and I was told that when you're there determines their relative visibility--just exactly how the sun hits them makes for significant differences. Nonetheless, I must admit that some of them I simply didn't see.

 But they're there, and about that there is no doubt. Nobody knows who did them, which is to say nobody knows much about just exactly what kind of tribe and culture was here. The pictures themselves tell us just about all we know. They were hunter/gatherers who ate and drank, loved and died, and, unless our speculation is silly, they had rituals, which implies some kind of faith. The Red Rock Ridge--what locals call the site--has likely been, and still is today, a holy place.

 Which is, to my estimation, understandable. When you stand beside ancient etchings that are, anthropologists suggest, at least 10,000 years old, when you see striations carved into the surface by a glacier that was here even before that, even the arrogant have to grab a breath. Almost all faiths, or so it seems to me, begin on the knees with a volley of stuttered breaths.

To some, I suppose, it might be tough to see a place like the Jeffers Petroglyphs as a holy place. If you stand up on the highest red rock there, you're no more than twenty feet above the lowest place within miles. Red Rock Ridge is a prairie high, really, and hardly a "ridge" at all. It's not the Royal Gorge or the Grand Canyon. There's no risk from that strange instinct some of us feel when we stand up at a precipice, an oddly suicidal urge to jump. Nope. Leap from the Sioux quartzite at the Jeffers site, and even the aged would have trouble breaking a bone.

 But if you've lived out here for awhile, it's perfectly understandable how--way back when, and even today--people continue to wander out to the site to sit and meditate. I wish it were closer to home. If you sit on that stone, surrounded by the emerald prairie, miles of open land yawning out in every direction, and realize that, long ago, men and women in bison skins sat here too, inscribing their visions in the pink rock, you'd have to say, in the parlance of the young, "whoa."

 "I'm like, 'whoa.'"

 That's really where faith begins--"like 'whoa.'" I like that.

I'm not sure a church can do that--or wants to. Some of the old cathedrals?--maybe; but today's more contemporary spaces? ex-shopping centers? new churches created to resemble skating rinks? Nah.

No matter, I suppose--as long as somehow, at some place in the liturgy we can't help ourselves from muttering, "like, 'whoa.'"

You know what I like best about Jeffers Petroglyphs? You can go there anytime. There's no fence. There's a wonderful little visitor's center, there's miles of native prairie, but there's no fence, which means, hard as it to believe in this day and age, it's always open, as a holy place should be. I'm not kidding. You could go there tonight, late, when there is nothing but moon and stars, and sit on the ridge. You could. No one would mind.

Like, "whoa."

 

I'm not sure why B is drying herself off in this illustration; she's clearly fully clothed. I'd guess this image is Sunday School art, the two of them on flannelgraph. This one is a G--for general audiences, although she appears to be conscious of the king's attentions.

David is a youngun' here, and B is barely visible in a street below. It's an interesting image, emphasizing David's being Israel's king, but it runs away from communicating anything at all about the story. It's another G-rated.

Here's a PG-13. David's mad frenzy is shown in the way he hangs onto the wall for support. I like that. But B is fully clothed. I can't help think that's cheating.

I'd call this one PG-13 too because both are fully clothed. David walking right into the bath is a nice idea, but she's bathing in her underclothes? Too sweet for an R. She looks remarkably compliant--was she?

Another PG-13. B is totally unconscious about her being in the King's vision. His being aways away, I like. He's perched up in a window frame over her left shoulder, looks perfectly at ease with ogling her, even though he's the King.

Here's an R, B is mostly naked and D is up on the next-door roof, leaning over a bit as if to get a better view. Is that his harp in his hands? B has five chambermaids, which is okay, I guess, but I've always thought of she and her husband as among the working class.

Here's another R, given the full frontal nudity. David is clearly peaking--he doesn't want to be seen even though he can't look away, and B is seeming totally unconscious of his eyes. Meanwhile, few illustrations capture his guilt; here, it's on display. He's ravaged by her body--that had to be true.

Another R--all that nudity. You have to look close, but in the building behind her David stands, a floor or two up, barely visible. I'm no expert on OT bathing rituals, but B seems completely oblivious to stopping traffic with her naked self. One of the difficult questions about the story is whether or not Bathsheba was a willing participant. This image suggests that she knew nothing of David's overheated attention.

Another R. David appears to be plotting out the sin that's already got hold of him. B is, at least, in theory compliant, conscious of her sexuality. They're both in on what's about to occur, even though she is likely unsure of the temperature of David's lust.

This is a nice shot, but it has none of the guilt and shame. Both are guilty--which is, of course, one way to read the story of their sin.

Interesting stuff.

A little more R-rated biblical storytelling

Don't know if you noticed, but yesterday after putting in the usual "Sunday Med" on this blog, I looked around for a suitable illustration by typing "King David and Bathsheba" into Google and turning up dozens and dozens of illustrations/paintings/flannelgraph images, oodles and oodles of choices, each of which established by its choice of detail its clearly preferred audience. The one I chose--that's it again, above--I liked because of its clear and hardy reference to war and death, the stream of soldiers off to battle. Sex is the entryway, but murder is the crime, the sin, that Nathan heaves on a guilty king in events yet to occur.

But this one also suggests that Bathsheba wasn't a picture of innocence as she bathed on portico, and she showed some flesh (many do not). All those images made me think they might just create an interesting post themselves sometime.

Then, we got our mail, having missed Saturday's, being out of town. There, amazingly, were two copies--I'd ordered them--of an old book of meditations (1995) I'd written years ago on request of the publisher. Crazy title--and not my choice--"Don't Pray with Mud on your Shoes"-- a bunch of meditations for 'tweens," that covered (that's debatable, I'm sure) the OT book of Numbers.

They were in our mailbox because I ordered them from used bookstores because I had only one on my shelf--and they weren't expensive. The preacher, last Sunday, had introduced his sermon by saying he was going to preach on the OT book of Numbers, because nobody ever quoted anything from the book or wrote much about it.

Well, guess what? I thought. I did, 30 years ago or so. 

Started paging through a bit, and guess what I found--Meditation #10. This is the intro.

"Let's face it. Even though the Bible doesn't carry parental warnings the way some contemporary music does, it has more than a few R-rated st0ries.

"For pure unmitigated violence, just think of King David smiting [emphasis mine--there's an old testament word] 18,000 Edomites in the Valley of Salt. For flat-out horrifying treachery, try Ehud's brutal murder of Eglon, the fat man king of Moab. Or for tragic family horrors, look no farther than the story of Amnon's rape of Tamar, and his eventual murder at the hands of Absalom--all of them David's own children.

"But sexuality? For that, nothing surpasses David's affair with Bathsheba, a woman so drop-dead gorgeous that when David, the man closest too God's own heart, ogles  her while bathingh, he falls into such a frenzy that eventually he stops at nothing, not even murder, to cover his lousy tracks." 

The Bathsheba story you'll find in the first book of Samuel, chaps 11 and 12. What I was going for in this meditation years ago was this passage from Numbers 5:  ‘Any man or woman who wrongs another in any way and so is unfaithful to the Lord is guilty and must confess the sin they have committed. They must make full restitution for the wrong they have done, add a fifth of the value to it and give it all to the person they have wronged."

So I found myself stuck with David and Bathsheba again, this time with a writer none other than myself speaking--at least attempting to speak--to 7th graders, where maybe this illustration would have been the right level.

 

After all, she looks 13-ish really, don't you think? And he looks a bit like a dirty old man, which, of course, he was.

Then again, that picture may be too close. How about this one? It's a little more graphic without being too, well, daring.

Or this:

The amazing story--I hate to say this--is about as difficult as there is to tell in OT or NT, yet few are more compelling.  

A couple more tomorrow. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“Then I acknowledged my sin to you 

and did not cover up my iniquity.”

Just a week or so ago, a woman came up to me at a conference and told me how much she’d enjoyed reading a novel of mine titled Touches the Sky. I’m thankful for any readers, but the ones who sing praises bring real delight. It’s an ego thing.

“The last chapter,” she told me, “—when I finished it, I cried.”

I can’t tell you how much that comment meant because the most indelible memory I have of having written that novel is the moment of its completion. I’d never felt exactly that way about anything I’d written, but when I finished the final chapter and wrote those last words—“please do, please do,” I was struck with the feeling that I had poured every last ounce of who I am into those final pages..

It’s embarrassing, in a way, to say that. The person you might meet on the street—the man you speak to when you talk to me—is not so much the human being he is as the man you hear in the words of that final chapter. It’s scary to say that.

Sometimes I tell my students that writers need to be flashers, willing to don and doff raincoats. It’s a lousy metaphor, but it gets their attention—and it’s not all wrong.

Nakedness isn’t easy. Physically, it is easy to some people—hence nudism. But metaphorically, it isn’t easy; even those who may well consider themselves most transparent can engineer pseudo-openness to cover their own precious nakedness.

I’m not sure any of us really know much about our nakedness because not many of us really know who we are. Some of us know we belong, body and soul, to our faithful Savior, and that’s an identity, a real identity. But who, really, are we? Who am I? That’s an essay question requiring a lifetime—actually, more—to answer.

When David retells the story he’s singing in Psalm 32, and when he gets to very heart of the action—“I acknowledge my sin and dropped the cover-up”—it’s amazing, isn’t it, to know that literally there was no cover up in the first place? Before God almighty, there are no flashers. There was nothing about the sordid Bathsheeba affair that God didn’t know—not the adultery or the premeditated murder of her husband Uriah. God saw it all. There were no secrets. Buck naked, all the time.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fascination with secret sin is fascinating in itself, but, in a way, silly because God is not a TV detective. He doesn’t need clues or even confessions to know what happened. He knows where we’ve been, who we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we think of what’s happened. Before his face, there are no secrets.

The really painful part of our coming to Him in confession is the injury, the pain which accrues when our precious will shatters like our pride, when we come to know we can’t do it on our own, when must crawl or be dragged before him.

When we give up, he smiles and nods and heals. When we come before him naked, he gives us a whole new wardrobe. What he wants, simply, is our human pride buckled before him. We have to get naked, even if there are no cover-ups.

That’s the song David is singing in Psalm 32.

Me, Burton Bartels, and Dutch psalms

"Burton Bartel's Dream Ministry" was published originally in the spring 1992 issue of Reformed Worship, a quarterly created and published by CRC Publications. IThe idea for the story has roots, of course, the deepest of which, I'd guess, is our experience in an Arizona CRC, two of them actually, Scottsdale and Orangewood, neither of which any longer exist. 

Arizona was full of homeless people. When I taught in a brand new high school on the north side of the city, if I had asked my students where they were from, very few would have referred me to an Arizona address; instead, it would be Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, California. Arizona was, at least in my experience, a haven for homeless, people who followed their dreams to start a new life in a new place, a new desert place. 

And so it was in the little bands of Dutch Americans who had migrated to the Valley of the Sun. Their roots had to bend and stretch beyond their power. "The way we used to do it at home" wasn't really a valid reason to carry on some convention of church life that may, at one time, been indispensable to good strong church life. Phoenix was a whole new world. Often enough, it made no sense to carry on already decaying traditions, like singing the Psalms, when no one could understand or speak the mother tongue.

The story I ran on this blog for the last three days is 34 years old. It's entirely possible that what Mr. Bartels thinks about the psalms and his psalmsters is at all important to piety today. I dreamed up Bartels, or, rather, I dreamed up his great idea for ministry--as far as I know, no such choir ever existed, even as a dream.

But last Friday night we attended an organ concert featuring the magnificent pipe organ in the BJ Haan auditorium. Maybe 100 people showed up--really couldn't have expected more. It was grand, greatly moving even though I wasn't familiar in the least with the work. Those Dutch psalms on that organ in that wide auditorium made me think of something I'd written long, long ago: 

    That June morning the idea came to him, it floated in on the harmony of Psalm 84, the Psalm which     woke him. And he said to himself, right there in bed, that the Psalms were just the thing. What a             ministry! After all, the Filipinos have their islander chants; the Mexicans the mariachi, the                     Bolivians, the huaino. My word, he thought, Paul Simon imported South African choruses for one         album and Brazilian percussion for the next. Dutch psalms--they were just the things, exactly the         ministry Peace Church needed for visibility. So Burton Bartels, construction czar suddenly become     musical entrepreneur, explained to everyone that the Psalmsters was going to become his own kind     of ministry.

Maybe, just maybe, what I heard and felt last weekend was some otherwise untapped sense of heritage. Maybe Dutch psalms, so deeply significant to the lives, the culture, of people of my own heritage, part of Dutch Reformed character. The thunderous chords of the old psalms were full of something I found resplendent, just like Mr. Bartels, who's Californian enough to believe that if he could create a good enough handful of musicians, he could, at once, put his struggling church on the map and do so in a fashion that could grow out of their own heritage.

The question that bugs him, however, is "can I call this a ministry?" Contemporarily, of course. People call just about everything "a ministry"--rag dolls to handbells. Ministry is clearly democratic today. Certainly the Psalmsters are a ministry, right there in the Rose Bowl Parade. 

Is he right? By the end of the story, he's not as sure as he once was, not in the face of devout piety he saw evidenced at a funeral back in the Midwest somewhere, like I did at the funeral of my wife's grandmother long, long ago. 

Don't know if that makes sense or not, but I pulled up Burton Bartels from the old Reformed Worship files and ran it just to see what I was thinking back then.

Burton Bartels' Dream Ministry - iii

A woman admitted him to the church, the woman the people in town called the koster, an old Dutch lady with a protruding forehead and button-like eyes, who knew little English but was excited to know that the names on the stones in the churchyard were actually ancestors of the American with the Dutch name and the strange hat.

Burton Bartels and the koster stood in that tiny Frisian church, and he imagined what the Peace Psalmsters would sound like in such a small place, so old. The woman scrambled around him, muttering things in Dutch, pointing to this or that, and finally dragging an extension cord out from beneath a bench in the back.

“You like this?” she said to him, and she strung the orange cord all the way from the back of the church up to a little Hammond organ that stood opposite the pulpit’s saluting sounding board, an organ which produced a tinny, flat electronic tone.

She played a few chords, proudly. The organ was new. She rolled her eyes. “Ve yust haf’ dis a yheah,” she told him. “Maybe you like to play?” Her bulk twisted slightly toward him on the shaky bench.

“No,” he said, raising a hand.

“We are for ‘dis so happy,” she told him, wincing, as if it were a sin to be so proud.

She turned back to the organ and, hands poised, waited for some inspiration, as if the music had to be something apropos. She shrugged her shoulders. “‘Vat to play?” she said, embarrassed, as much to herself as to him.

She didn’t look at all like his mother. Her vigor was the opposite of his mother’s slow deliberate way, but this woman had a sense of humor not unlike the woman who’d raised him, shrewd and wily--and both of them were heavy. It seemed as if she knew him well, after what?--twenty minutes.

But his mother came back to him right there, not because what the koster played was Psalm 42 or 84 or even Old Hundredth. His mother came back to him in that old Frisian church because he saw in her something he’d not felt in himself or even the Psalmsters, something he’d only seen, but long ago forgotten in the way his mother had long ago played the organ. She came back to him because the woman did not perform at all, she only played. What she did with her hands, in that old church, was play that cheap electronic organ proudly, in the way his mother did, a way that suddenly opened his eyes to something other than ministry, other than performance, other than making a name--something he had a hard job naming, but something he knew finally he could call nothing more or less than worship.

What she played wasn’t anything from the repertoire of the Peace Psalmsters. It was, of all things, “Shall We Gather at the River”; and she played it by ear, no pedals, a few chords here and there so heartily hammered that she threatened the bench with the force of her hands, her shoulders rolling, her eyes up, her round fists pounding as if her fingers were themselves capable of volume.

But what he heard was the sound of something he’d thought he’d forgotten for so many years, something so real, so vivid, so unshowy, that he had to look away--not because it lacked virtuosity, but because it seemed to him to be too close to something he’d left behind.

“Thees thing ist new,” she told him again when she was finished, and she rubbed her hands over the top as if the organ were waiting to be stroked. “‘Ve is all so proud,” she said.

When he didn’t respond, she asked, “You haf’ maybe sometink in your eyes?”

He shook his head.

To say that Burton Bartels’ great idea died that day in Piiam, Fries land, the Netherlands, would be half-truth. The Peace Psalmsters have gone on to even greater fame and fortune, although now its members are drawn professionally, outside the church. Watch for them at a concert in your area. You’ll never forget them.

But after that midday visit to the old church where his ancestors had worshiped and left, after that impromptu recital on a four-hundred dollar Hammond, a rendition of “Shall We Gather at the River,” he never once called his own great idea, the Peace Psalmsters, a ministry again.

Burton Bartel's Dream Ministry --ii

A wealthy Californian with a Dutch name suffers a dream that he believes will put his slowly dying little church on the map. He calls it a ministry.

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That great idea came to him in those strange images that are lolling in the mind the moment one hears a morning alarm, this one coming to him out of the memory of his mother’s funeral, a memory he’d sworn he’d packed away so deeply that it rose only in his dreams.

What he’d heard that morning was the flush chords of a Dutch Psalm. For her funeral, his mother had requested Psalm 84, in the Dutch, of course. She’d asked it of the preacher.

So Burton Bartels, the only one of his brothers and sisters dressed in suede for the funeral, sat in the front bench of the white frame church where he’d been baptized, and listened to a few old voices in the church who could still sing the Dutch, long and slow in coming, an ancient drone that seemed almost bewitching, coming from so far and deep in a forgotten past.

That June morning the idea came to him, it floated in on the harmony of Psalm 84, the Psalm which woke him. And he said to himself, right there in bed, that the Psalms were just the thing. What a ministry! After all, the Filipinos have their islander chants; the Mexicans the mariachi, the Bolivians, the huaino. My word, he thought, Paul Simon imported South African choruses for one album and Brazilian percussion for the next. Dutch psalms--they were just the things, exactly the ministry Peace Church needed for visibility. So Burton Bartels, construction czar suddenly become musical entrepreneur, explained to everyone that the Psalmsters was going to become his own kind of ministry.

And that was exactly what it became. People from all over said how much they enjoyed the unique music the Psalmsters created. Wasn’t their very fame a result of God’s blessing? Wasn’t the fact that they were singing in so many churches--Roman Catholic, even charismatic--proof of the Spirit’s work? Wasn’t this, after all, really ministry?--he told himself.

Their repertoire was drawn in its entirety from the old Dutch Psalter, authentic Genevan Psalms, in the Dutch (one can avoid too much talk of God by singing in another language, after all), but preserved in their integrity and sung without accompaniment--in the original tempos and with only occasional harmonic flourishes.

What they created was simply enchanting. What was better was that in Southern California, no one was doing it. The old Psalms, their haunting melodies and seemingly dissonant harmonies, their plodding, relentless rhythms, were, to sunny California, Christian and non-Christian alike, simply unreal. The Peace Psalmsters, a cappella, grew immensely popular.

After five years and dozens of engagements, Burton Bartels--who’d never had musical training other than the regimen of hymns and psalms he had heard his mother play on the Wurlitzer in the family room--gave up the baton to Evert Nykamp, a Dutch musicologist from UCLA, who wasn’t a Christian at all, but, my word, did he know music.

That’s when the Governor called. That’s when the ethnic festivals from San Diego to San Francisco begged their participation; that’s when Burton Bartels began spending long nights on the phone, arranging performances at community churches two and three years in advance.

And that’s when they received the request to tour in the Netherlands. Nykamp claimed that the Holland of his birth would look upon the whole enterprise with the same curiosity as North Americans, so far behind them, too, was the tradition of the Psalms.

But in a small village just off the North Sea, the great idea for ministry finally died in Burton Bartels, in a village so small one could walk it, end to end, in less than ten minutes and still meet and speak to most of the inhabitants. In the very center, he stood in the old fourteenth century church where some long-ago Bartels family had worshiped generations before.

It was a strange experience, and he was oddly moved. High-backed chairs stood arranged in a seating position that suggested a hierarchy in the worshipers. He was stunned by the fact that little more than a handful of people had worshiped within those walls for more than five hundred years--so long without growth. It was such a small place, room for maybe one hundred at most. No room for fellowship, of course, and obviously no room to grow.

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more tomorrow. . .