Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 84

These Sunday Morning meditations were penned years ago, one after another, until I'd done 365, just for my own edification really. This one should really have a sequel because my teaching gig at the home turned into one of the highlights of my life. The joy is almost too great to pass along, but it turned the old folks home into "a place of springs." Their honesty and joy was a rich blessing.

These days, I'm almost one of the 'em. 

"As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools.  They go from strength to strength, till each appears before God in Zion.”

This afternoon, I’ll fly off to British Columbia, where, in the next few days, I’m scheduled to do a number of things, including visit some old folks in an independent living facility named Elim Home, a couple dozen or more seniors who want to hear me read a story. That’s the plan.

The word got out. The good folks at Elim Home got the news of their being visited by a writer, who was going to read something he’d written, the man who’d written things so often in their church magazine. “You know him, maybe, eh? He’s from a long ways away—from Iowa, in the States—and he’s coming to Elim Home. Ja, sure.”

Lots of Dutch brogues in this place.

One of them phoned the man who arranged my schedule on this visit.
“’Ve was yust now talking,” he told him, “and ‘ve ‘vere ‘vondering whethder Mr. Schaap might yust come a little early ant’ help us learn to write our own stories.”

Some requests simply aren’t to be denied.

It ought to be a kick. I’m sure I’ll live through it and have plenty of laughs along the way.

I’m not sure why, but that polite request makes me smile. Maybe it’s because I just finished another couple of semesters of teaching. Sometimes—not all the time, and I don’t want to overstate—coming into class can be like walking into a wake. Not a student in the room is really interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson. But this Vancouver class, this gaggle of seniors, they want more time, not less, and more attention, not less. They want real teaching. They want to learn. I know, I know, I sound really whiny.

But the possibility of assuaging my wounded pride is not the only reason the Elim Home request has made my week. The other is what it is those old folks are demanding: they want help writing their stories. Good night, they’re all seniors, and they’re just now getting started thinking seriously about writing their life stories. “How can ‘ve do dat best?” they’ll say, I’m sure. There’s just something so good, so strong, so hearty about a home full of old folks wanting to learn. Whether they can is a good question; that they want to is unmitigated blessing.

It seems the older I get, the more I have to learn to pay attention to those kinds of blessings or I miss them altogether. Honestly, the prospect of visiting a couple dozen retired Dutch immigrants who want to write their life stories—it’s sheer joy to consider. It’s a peppermint in a snoozy sermon. It’s enough to make you smile.

I don’t know that anyone has a clue about the Valley of Baca, although I’d guess that some biblical scholars will be happy to hazard a theory. But then, I’m not sure that the relative glories of that place are all that important to understanding the psalm. What’s at the heart of these verses of Psalm 84 is a tribute to people who pay attention to joy, who let it fill them, who let it carry them over the dark places. These are people of pilgrimage, who take their strength from God, whose very footsteps make the desert bloom. These are people who sing in the rain.

And Thursday I’ll be blest by being among ‘em.

Old McDonald

It's in me too, even though as far back as I can reach there are no farmers--well, there were no farmers who knew and loved what they were doing. Doesn't matter really. In this country at least, there's enough of Jefferson in the national psyche to recognize that, this time of year, it's only right and fitting to plant seeds in the ground. It's simply what we do, like breathing. "People who don't plant seeds don't know God," an old friend used to quip, only half-jokingly.

So I shouldn't be surprised that our granddaughter has seemingly taken it up and done so so splendidly. "Do you think we could possibly use some space in your vegetable boxes--just some?" In this life, generally grandparents don't say no to such requests. What's a few tomatoes anyway? You know how it goes: by early October it's just work to anything with them. As much as you know how much you'll miss 'em come  February, it's easier to let them go, then annoint a special Saturday to mopping up the shards left from the season.

"Sure," we said. "We're getting old. We don't need all that space."

And thus it began. 

She has sisters-in-law who rekindle memories of Old McDonald. She'll have the world's best training in the world's best soil, and--guess what?--we'll have them around our place. They'll be here, in our house, in our backyard. We know people who move hundreds of miles to be anywhere close to their grandchildren. My word--ours will spend a goodly chunk of this summer in our backyard. 

Besides, it's cute to watch them, busy as ground squirrels, measuring inches and plopping beans into furrows--and there are onion sets, some vegetably stuff I never heard of, even broccoli--they're not holding back for a couple of rookies. 

Get this: we get to watch. How many grandparents aren't at this moment going seasonably green with envy? 

And then there's this too. Sometime this fall, when mopping up will be the only thing going on out back, there'll be more, much more than there ever was because next fall sometime the two of them will be joined by one of their very own, a roly-poly miracle the two of them have nurtured into life, a brand new baby. 

It's impossible to imagine that, but go ahead and try. We'll be great-grandparents, amazing as that may sound.

You can bet I won't let them out of mopping up. It's the duty of every last gardener on the planet. When the northwest winds set up for winter, flecked with snow, somebody's got to clean up.  

"Dad's got most the work done," great-Grandma will say. "But come on by--just be sure you bring the family."

New Heavens and a New Earth

Yesterday's note from Frederick Buechner created a scene I can't help but live with. I'm not sure of his or its sheer orthodoxy, or whoever's orthodoxy we're driven by these days; but his resolution of a view of the afterlife seems warmfully offered here, and I say, quite forcefully, that I like it.

It would be advantageous to have him offer a comment himself right now, having passed away some years ago. He's a far more trustworthy officer of the truth these days, I'd suppose, at least when it comes to what he's offering here.

Heaven

 

 

“AND I SAW THE HOLY CITY, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying . . . 'Behold, I make all things new' " (Revelation 21:2-5).   Everything is gone that ever made Jerusalem, like all cities, torn apart, dangerous, heartbreaking, seamy. You walk the streets in peace now. Small children play unattended in the parks. No stranger goes by whom you can't imagine a fast friend. The city has become what those who loved it always dreamed and what in their dreams it always was. The new Jerusalem. That seems to be the secret of heaven. The new Chicago, Leningrad, Hiroshima, Baghdad. The new bus driver, hot-dog man, seamstress, hairdresser. The new you, me, everybody.   It was always buried there like treasure in all of us—the best we had it in us to become—and there were times you could almost see it. Even the least likely face, asleep, bore traces of it. Even the bombed-out city after nightfall with the public squares in a shambles and moonlight silvering the broken pavement. To speak of heavenly music or a heavenly day isn't always to gush but sometimes to catch a glimpse of something. "Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more," the book of Revelation says (21:4). You can catch a glimpse of that too in almost anybody's eyes if you choose the right moment to look, even in animals' eyes.   If the new is to be born, though, the old has to die. It is the law of the place. For the best to happen, the worst must stop happening—the worst we are, the worst we do. But maybe it isn't as difficult as it sounds. It was a hardened criminal within minutes of death, after all, who said only, "Jesus, remember me," and that turned out to be enough. "This day you will be with me in paradise" was the answer he just managed to hear.    -Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

 

Alice Munro (1931-2024)

I didn't know I'd be drawn into Native American history. I didn't know we'd come to live in a brand new house with an entire acre of land between us and the Floyd River. I had no idea that acre and that land would employ us, spring 'till fall. I thought I'd pay golf just up the road and drown worms in nearby ponds, and the river, of course. The truth is I didn't know what retirement was or would be.

I'd created mandates, from what little I knew. I'd get myself a definitive edition of Emily Dickinson  (accomplished!) and go through the poems (begun. . .) as closely as I could, knowing that often a meaning would be elusive. "Read Emily Dickinson." 

I took along, from school, thirty or forty books from my teaching library, just a few books that I treasured--Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, every last Ray Carver I had, Toni Morrison's Beloved, a few more. I've never been a person who reads a book twice--I'm not that good of a reader. Honestly, I've been envious for most of my days of the instinctual love of reading some people have. I don't have it--I wish I did. There are books I took along simply because I didn't know if I could honestly live without them all around, but I've never read a book twice--that takes a real reader. 

I took with us my entire collection of Alice Munro. Having read maybe three or four of them and  used many individual stories in classes, I knew her work (she was only a short story writer) were perfectly wonderful. When I retire, I told myself, "I'm going to read the entire library of Alice Munro, eight or ten books of her short stories, because I loved so much of what I'd read. 

See that picture above?--that's the first row of the upper bookcase standing in front of my desk. Haven't been touched until this morning, when I opened Friend of My Youth and was once again reminded how I learned to love reading, an act that, as I said, didn't come natural to me. I am--I'm baring my soul here--an analyzer, not simply a listener, and while there are advantages to what I do, there are disadvantages too. Just look at what happens to the bare page. Who do you know that scribbles up a page like that?

All of this is occasioned by the death of Alice Munro, an event which struck me to the bones when I read it in a news flash from NY Times. I knew she'd retired from writing (in 2013), when she announced she was suffering from dementia. I knew she won the Nobel Prize for literature that year as well, a fitting choice. I know I wrote about it on this blog years ago, but the truth is I  hadn't heard of her or even thought of her for some time.

And now she's gone. For a long time, there has been no new Alice Munro collection--I would suppose that's part of it too. But the announcement seemed almost a missive from outer space--"Alice Munro--dead?"

Let me just say this quickly: she was (and is: "literature lives") nothing less than the best short story writer of all time.

I won't say anymore, but don't be surprised if you read more about her on these pages because I really ought to make it a solemn vow now, a resolution, to read all I have of Alice Munro. 

There she is, still alive, right down front of the desk where I'm sitting now. See her? Top of the page.

Morning Thanks--the little climber

I wish I were a little more responsible when it comes to plants out back.  I mean, it's a fault I could work at if I was younger I than I am, a response ("if I were younger") which I make often these days and may well be just another way of forsaking duty still very much my own. Rather than the most important distinction--is this little beauty a one-season-er or can I plan on its return every spring?--I don't give a rip about its name or genus or species. What I care about is what's on the outside--to wit, how is it going to pretty up the backyard? That seems awfully vain of me, don't you think? There's something inherently sinful about regarding only outside appearances. I honestly don't bother about names; I just pick up the pretties. 

Including the climbers. We've got a wonderful stony retaining wall running on both sides of our backyard. I made it--just about the only thing about this place in the country that I constructed--not the rocks, of course; they took millions of years, but the wall itself--think Robert Frost maybe. 

Several years ago, I bought a darling little climber from the plant store, not because I knew a thing about its identity, but because the idea of some climbing plant inching its way up the stone walls, a vine-like creation--sounded perfectly beautiful--no, let me change that, "looked" perfectly beautiful in the magic garden my imagination creates every April. Bought it--complete with its own little ladder to remind itself of what it is and why it does what it does--planted it (following directions) then waited for it to begin to fulfill the promises it had registered in my mind.

Let's just say whatever arose from the good Iowa soil was pitiful, not worth mentioning. The plant itself did make clear in packaging that it was a perennial, but it's first year's show was so meager that whether or not it cared to show its face the second spring, to me, completely was to me a decision it along would make. (Meanwhile, I bought a cheap little trellis, more for the birds than that little climber.

What happened? Nothing. Perfectly nothing. Meanwhile the bushes my wife had chosen were prospering with such abundance that whatever it was I'd planted, that little oh-so-cute climber, for instance, simply lost their standing, which is a nice way of saying, I suppose, that they lost their  square corner of creation. 

Last year, amazingly, that little climber inched up healthily, as if out of nowhere, but, once again lost its standing when the bushes beside it just shouldered it out of the way. By September, I thought it was gone until I started cleaning up and realized that what it had eventually spun out was quite considerable--but definitely overshadowed by the healthy perennial bushes all around.

And now's the time to look back at that picture at the top of the page because that's our unnamed climbing plant, purchased as many as a half-dozen years ago, but this spring off to the kind of start any major leaguer would be happy about, already climbing the old rickety trellis I stuck when I actually had dreams for what that climber could do or be. 

Now rather than create the sermon out of all of this, I'll let you fellow Calvinists write your own, although in this case the sermon writes itself, and does so beautifully too, even if I can't name the climber, because this year the climber is going to establish a presence, a standing. Who knows how it'll flower?--or if it will at all. Who knows, I may just put my phone to work and find out who it is. 

The climber deserves a name.

End of sermon. 

I'm thinking, "Mothers' Day, hmmm. . ."

Seems downright amazing today, but in the years just following the Civil War, two activist groups determined to get women the right to vote, went toe-to-toe for reasons that, in retrospect, seem as lightweight as their skirmishing. The National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) actually opposed the passing of the 15^th amendment to the U. S. Constitution (prohibiting states from denying male citizens the right to vote, thus admitting African-American men). The NWSA was not the least bit racist. The grounds for their opposition was that admitting the newly-freed slaves to vote seemed wrong if women of all races weren’t given the same right.

On the other hand, the American Women’s Suffrage Association (AWSA) supported the passage of the 15^th amendment, arguing that even if women did not gain enfranchisement at this particular time, excluding African-American men from gaining their freedom would perpetuate injustice and be, quite simply, flat-out wrong.

‘Twas a fierce rivalry, as political battles are, even though both organizations laid claim to the same mission—to gain a woman’s right to vote—in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The battle was waged about how.

We tend to think of change coming to rural areas like our own only when winds blow hard from either coast. In this case, however, it’s simply not true. When the two warring women’s groups pulled themselves back together, it was here, in Nebraska, in 1890, at the bidding of locals who had, for the most part, kept themselves above fracas.

Erasmus Correll, who edited the Hebron Journal, and his wife—together the two of them created the greatly successful Western Women’s Journal—were tireless voices for the women’s suffrage, writing extensively themselves but also bringing suffrage notables to the rural heartland, women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who gave speeches to packed houses in small towns.

Mr. Correll was rewarded by the AWSA for his pioneering work by being chosen as its President in 1881. He was indefatigable. "It affords me much pleasure to thankfully accept the position and its duties,” he said, “and divide the honor among the earnest men and women who are. . .seeking the highest political welfare of humanity." Correll noted that "Having devoted my life to the cause of Equal Rights, no labor will be avoided.” Presumably, none was.

Just a year later the warring factions signed a peace accord to combine forces in the quest for women’s suffrage. Local folks played peacemakers and, at the same time, roused the newly conformed army for battle.

Hard as it is to believe, getting women the vote was almost impossible, even here, despite the activism. One of the most prominent advocates in Nebraska told his daughter in a private letter that the fight for women’s rights was no cakewalk. “Between ourselves--there is no more hope for carrying woman suffrage in Nebraska than of the millennium coming next year,” he told her.  “. . .We don’t want to discourage the workers, . . .but don't publish my predictions.”

And it wouldn’t be a short war. Thirty-five years would have to pass before Nebraska passed women’s suffrage in 1917, Iowa and South Dakota in 1919, with the passage of the 19^th amendment.

Great power in that crusade began here, not far away in rural America. Why? One reason might well be the difficult lives homesteaders went through to establish house and home. Man or woman, husband or wife—no one sat on their laurels. If a living were to be made, if a claim were to be improved, a life to be lived—if a loving home in the middle of all that openness were to be created, responsibilities had to be shared, equally. Equally. 

Male and female created He them.

Sunday Morning Meds --from Psalm 84

 [An entire week off, not by my choice. I was kept away. Pain mostly.  I think I'm on the way to recovery, but it'll be a long haul, I'm sure. Anyway, this Psalm meditation dates itself. If you know me at all, you can likely guess how old it is--we celebrated our 50th anniversary a couple of years ago.

Be back soon, I hope!)

“Blessed are those whose strength is in you, 

who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.”

 Today my wife and I will go to a wedding rehearsal. Two kids I met just yesterday will exchange vows, and I’m conducting the ceremony. I’m not ordained. The couple’s uncle is a judge; he’ll make the bond legal. They wanted someone to “do the wedding.” I’ve never “done a wedding,” but this is family, not close family, but family.

I admire their idealism, what seems even their estimable foolhardiness, simply in tying the knot. Getting married is a good thing, the right thing to do, even if their second cousin (me) is likely to fumble through the ceremony In Protestant tradition marriage not a sacrament; but, Lord knows, it’s a big, big deal.

But I’m of the age when their sweet resolve to plunge into a legal and (somewhat) binding contract seems, well, dreamy in an adolescent way. The whole thing seems scary. They are so young and they are, really, so dumb. They’ve been dating seven years, which has the sound of something biblical. No matter: to the mind of any oldster, they don’t know squat.

In their mid-80s, my parents suddenly turned into scrappers, even though I don’t remember their ever being particularly cross with each other before, at least in my presence. They got in each others’ hair something awful. At the very end, do we really go it alone, like the medieval play Everyman so fearfully promises? Do even our closest relationships fail us? I don’t know.

What I know is this. Last night my wife and I skipped an end-of year gala and stayed home by ourselves, in part because we’re becoming less social, but also because in our 35-year marriage, right now nothing seems more blessed than being alone, just the two of us. Playing hooky on a gala was low-stakes. Couch potatoes get bad press.          

I could try to explain all of that to this young couple—I’ve got to give a homily; I could tell them how we stayed home and simply enjoyed each other. I could try, but their being 22 means they wouldn’t begin to understand. 

They’ve got their individual pilgrimage(s) ahead of them, just as we did, and my parents before us. Those two kids will be starting out on Sunday, and all the diagrams, the how-tos, all the counseling sessions we can offer will mean little to them because they’ll have to create their own map as they go, just as we did. 

Marriages are a big, big deal for all of us really. Every cow-eyed young couple carries all our hopes with them when they recite their vows; because our hope, like theirs, is for nothing more or less than the first word of Psalm 85: 5—to be blessed. 

I cannot imagine life without faith. Faith was the soul of our solitary night together, even though we didn’t recite bible verses. The two of us have spent hours and hours in prayer in our lives together, hours of pleading that sometimes seemed fruitless, but wasn’t. Guess what?--we’ll keep praying because faith isn’t something one wears like a tux; and we are blessed—as the psalmist says—by putting our faith in God. I know that’s true. Our pilgrimage, begun so long ago, continues. Our story continues to unfold.

I hope somewhere down the line we don’t start to carp at each other, but then, my mother would roll her eyes if I brought up the subject. “What do you know, really, about pilgrimage, young as you are?” she’d say. And she’d probably be right.

What she’d tell me, unequivocally, is that their sixty years of marriage was a great ride, a pilgrimage, begun and lived in faith. She’d say, I’m sure, she was blessed.