Together with about a hundred others, we sat, on Friday night, in the BJ Haan auditorium for an organ recital. It was awesome. The first time I ever heard a real Dutch psalm sung was at a funeral, my wife's grandma, who died soon after we moved to Iowa. It was a transcendent experience for me because I knew that the stock from which I'd come had once responded to the resplendent beauty of that music with grave honor and deep and spiritual respect. That funeral service featured two Dutch psalms sung in the Dutch language because my grandma-in-law had so loved them. I found them haunting.
At the time I had been asked to contribute stories to a new publication titled Reformed Worship. Ever on the lookout for good, new material, I remembered my appreciation for the Dutch psalms sung at Grandma Visser's funeral. Thus begat this story.
What's up for a few days on this blog is the story that grew out of that funeral's menu of music, 30-some years ago, I believe, a story conjured up from this computer's memory as a result of the gorgeous organ recital we attended a few night's ago. It just seemed to me that the psalms in traditional fashion heard from a magnificent pipe organ was maybe the most significant musical gift to usher from the Dutch Reformed tradition, our peculiar gift to the American experience.
As I sat there, I couldn't help thinking of this old story about a man who also sees what I glimpsed years and years ago at Grandma's funeral in First Orange City church.
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Burton Bartels' Dream Ministry
Burton Bartels’ incredible idea for ministry finally materialized when the church he’d attended since moving to California gave him permission to create a special ministry musical group and to sing occasionally in the services. It died ten years later, sort of, in Piiam, the Netherlands, having lived a wonderful life. Therein lies his story.
He watched his dream grow when the finest singers from Peace Church signed up to help, once they’d heard his plan; he saw the color of that dream (most dreams are in black and white, experts say) when, on the first Sunday of Lent, those same fine singers sang for the very first time, the women in long black dresses, the men in black ties and slacks, white shirts, and, of course, suspenders--costumes he’d paid for himself, so deep was his commitment to the dream.
He heard the dream awaken fully when the Peace Psalmsters first combined their voices into something that was, well, breathtaking, vivid and haunting harmonic melodies in August chant-like rhythms that, in only a few years, churches all over Southern California found enchanting, almost other-worldly. Few had ever heard the majesty of Genevan Psalms before.
The wonderful dream was of a musical group, he said, that would quite definitely put Peace Church on the map. The whole idea seemed so elemental to him, so right--a ministry that would return the congregation to its roots, many of Peace’s members having Dutch surnames.
And it worked. He was right beyond his wildest dream. The Peace Psalmsters were celebrated throughout the state only a few years after the dream came to him. The Governor asked them to entertain his guests in Sacramento; they were special guests during the Rose Bowl festivities in Pasadena; they sang Sunday after Sunday in mega-churches all over L.A., in shopping malls during the Lenten season, and in Crystal Cathedral three and sometimes four times a year--always in the authentic Dutch language.
And everywhere they went, people found their slow and rhythmic strength, unaccompanied by organ or piano, to be haunting, yet stately, dignified, almost mystic, like Gregorian chants but wider of girth in harmonic structure, deliriously beautiful. So quaint, people said, so exotic, so wonderful.
This wonderful idea came to him one dawn, several months after his mother’s funeral in Iowa. He had visited her faithfully in the forty years since he’d left. At least once a year he went back home, at first with family; but then, as his children grew and his wife’s business came to dominate more of her time, he’d gone alone. He’d tried to get his mother to move to a rest home in San Mateo, but, stubbornly and not unpredictably, she’d insisted on staying in freezing Holland Center, where she was born--and where, finally, she died.
The doctors had called the family to her bedside in late January, mid-winter, and by the time he’d arrived in Iowa, her life was already dependent on the machines that gauged the rhythm of her breathing in a series of thin orange lines. Once he saw her lying there, the only thought he had, the thought he didn’t share with anyone, not even his siblings, was his overwhelming shock at how far one could journey from his or her roots, specifically how really distant even a mother could look to a man who’d once been almost as dependent on her as she was now on the machines that kept her blood pumping.
What made him cry that weekend was not his mother’s death, but the truth his own vagrancy made vivid to him: that he really didn’t need his mother--and he hadn’t for years.
But he never told anyone what he’d felt, not even his wife, and he buried his mother there, in a country churchyard, with the memories that he thought to be already, for the most part, long gone.
The great idea of the Peace Psalmsters came to him one morning--just like all of his good ideas for marketing had, like Bible verses on the spinning barrels of his cement trucks, building churches for a discount, and enclosing the company logo in the outline of a fish. If Peace Church, like his construction business, was ever to garner its share of California’s teeming unsaved multitudes, it had to have a gimmick, after all. Everybody had puppet ministries and theater troupes--why not Psalmsters, he thought. Why couldn’t the Peace calling card be created out of its own immigrant past? Ethnics! He said--everyone was into ethnics. It was a wonderful idea, he thought, for real ministry.
He watched his dream grow when the finest singers from Peace Church signed up to help, once they’d heard his plan; he saw the color of that dream (most dreams are in black and white, experts say) when, on the first Sunday of Lent, those same fine singers sang for the very first time, the women in long black dresses, the men in black ties and slacks, white shirts, and, of course, suspenders--costumes he’d paid for himself, so deep was his commitment to the dream.
He heard the dream awaken fully when the Peace Psalmsters first combined their voices into something that was, well, breathtaking, vivid and haunting harmonic melodies in August chant-like rhythms that, in only a few years, churches all over Southern California found enchanting, almost other-worldly. Few had ever heard the majesty of Genevan Psalms before.
The wonderful dream was of a musical group, he said, that would quite definitely put Peace Church on the map. The whole idea seemed so elemental to him, so right--a ministry that would return the congregation to its roots, many of Peace’s members having Dutch surnames.
And it worked. He was right beyond his wildest dream. The Peace Psalmsters were celebrated throughout the state only a few years after the dream came to him. The Governor asked them to entertain his guests in Sacramento; they were special guests during the Rose Bowl festivities in Pasadena; they sang Sunday after Sunday in mega-churches all over L.A., in shopping malls during the Lenten season, and in Crystal Cathedral three and sometimes four times a year--always in the authentic Dutch language.
And everywhere they went, people found their slow and rhythmic strength, unaccompanied by organ or piano, to be haunting, yet stately, dignified, almost mystic, like Gregorian chants but wider of girth in harmonic structure, deliriously beautiful. So quaint, people said, so exotic, so wonderful.
This wonderful idea came to him one dawn, several months after his mother’s funeral in Iowa. He had visited her faithfully in the forty years since he’d left. At least once a year he went back home, at first with family; but then, as his children grew and his wife’s business came to dominate more of her time, he’d gone alone. He’d tried to get his mother to move to a rest home in San Mateo, but, stubbornly and not unpredictably, she’d insisted on staying in freezing Holland Center, where she was born--and where, finally, she died.
The doctors had called the family to her bedside in late January, mid-winter, and by the time he’d arrived in Iowa, her life was already dependent on the machines that gauged the rhythm of her breathing in a series of thin orange lines. Once he saw her lying there, the only thought he had, the thought he didn’t share with anyone, not even his siblings, was his overwhelming shock at how far one could journey from his or her roots, specifically how really distant even a mother could look to a man who’d once been almost as dependent on her as she was now on the machines that kept her blood pumping.
What made him cry that weekend was not his mother’s death, but the truth his own vagrancy made vivid to him: that he really didn’t need his mother--and he hadn’t for years.
But he never told anyone what he’d felt, not even his wife, and he buried his mother there, in a country churchyard, with the memories that he thought to be already, for the most part, long gone.
The great idea of the Peace Psalmsters came to him one morning--just like all of his good ideas for marketing had, like Bible verses on the spinning barrels of his cement trucks, building churches for a discount, and enclosing the company logo in the outline of a fish. If Peace Church, like his construction business, was ever to garner its share of California’s teeming unsaved multitudes, it had to have a gimmick, after all. Everybody had puppet ministries and theater troupes--why not Psalmsters, he thought. Why couldn’t the Peace calling card be created out of its own immigrant past? Ethnics! He said--everyone was into ethnics. It was a wonderful idea, he thought, for real ministry.
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The heavy word in that last sentence is ministry. More tomorrow.
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