Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

The Ronna deal



Some might well have agreed with NBC news management. Hiring Ronna McDaniel, the recently felled chair of the Republican Party, would be a good move for the network, lending some balance to their lib-leaning programming. Bringing a Republican ringer in would have steered the course of the whole gang in a more conservative direction, "righting" the course, you might say.

That Ms. McDaniel, who had deliberately erased her family name, Romney, in a move to point out her intra-party loyalties, was obviously talented enough to hold her own behind a microphone.  MSNBC wanted to invite a broader audience to its news programming.

Then, the shit it the fan. Don't know if you saw it or not but on Meet the Press, ye oldest TV program on the air, Chuck Todd, blasted NBC management for that decision, apologizing to moderator Kristin Welker, for having to do what she just had done, interviewing Ronna McDaniel, an interview that was set up before McDaniel had been hired by the network.

Then, Monday morning, the Morning Joe principles went ballistic about it too. NBC News upper management faced a full-fledged revolt. Everybody went hostile, at least most all of NBC's on-air stars.

Yesterday, management reversed field and broke off whatever handshake existed between the network and Ms. McDaniel. So much for the uprising. The stars won the day.

I haven't checked but I'm guessing Laura Ingram and her ilk will point at the whole mess and giggle about "lib censorship" scribbling it on every last post-it in the office. "So much for 'balance' among the lefties--they throw a conservative under the bus." You know how that goes.

But if I were Chuck Todd, I'd have come out swinging at management too--not because Ronna McDaniel was the kind of conservative voice MSNBC's gang of libs couldn't stand, but because she was MAGA's co-chair. She sold the "stop the steal" madness as wholesale as anyone. She simply repeated Trump's lies. Hers was among the strongest voices claiming MSNBC was "fake news." She was no friend of the network, nor any of its principles.

As Todd maintained on Meet the Press Sunday morning, how could viewers trust the commentary of anyone who'd climbed on the "Stop the Steal" bandwagon? When, on Sunday morning, she was asked about her appraisal of the 2020 election she said something to the effect of this sort of thing: in her position as Party Chair, she really had to play with the team. For the record, on Sunday morning, she said Biden won the 2020 election. 

That turn of mind is what's ailing this country. Trump is one thing, but when Republican stalwarts like John Thune and Randy Feenstra take one for the team and say nothing at all about Trump's silly "American Bible," that's why we're in the pickle we are as a nation.

Chuck Todd was right. Why should anyone believe Ronna McDonald on Sunday morning, when she says, in truth, there was no rigged election? She'd sung a wholly different song just a week or so ago when she was a soloist in Trump's choir. 

I can't help but believe that maybe someday people will look back on the days of Trump and point at "Stop the Steal" as the lie it was right from the beginning, and how that outright lie steamrolled through the American electorate and created the ills suffered thereafter--for how many years is yet to be determined. 

"He who sups with the Devil best use a long spoon."

Monday, March 25, 2024

Pep


Look, you got to hand it to him. He's my age, for pity sake; in fact, he's two years older. He's about my size too, and he eats like he's 17. He travels over the country, as if Vegas and Mara Lago are twin cities. He has his own plane or two--that helps: he doesn't get stuck in lines waiting to be searched. The man has more get-up-n-go than anybody I know my age. My mother, who liked him, would say he's a man with a whole lot of pep. 

Some days he wins, some day no, but there's not a day on his calendar when he doesn't create a fresh ink spill, or achieve it anyway by way of the cat-scratching mob. A little scandal, well-handled, goes a long ways to keep him in the news. So why not give them something to talk about?

"Remind me--what's the President's name again?--I mean the guy who's running against Trump?"

So it goes. Today too. He's makes the Ever-ready Bunny look housebound. 

According to the website Just Security, he's got two hot buttons today. 

Monday, March 25, 2024

The first one alone would have sacked any other candidate for President in the history, but the last one is can of fireworks. In all likelihood, he'll come up with a buzzer-beater. He's going to tell his admiring throng that he really has no money? Nonsense. Then again, a punch-drunk Trump has used pity to grab dollars for years: "I am your retribution."

And now, today, let's see what's on the calendar of a man two years younger:
  • Garbage out.
Yessiree, that's it. 

I'm saying, you got to hand it to him. He's a man of boundless energies and limitless strengths, a man capable of lying his way through every last 24-hour chunk of his life and, at four in the morning, going on Truth Social and ripping off some guy's nose. Yup, pep. 

He's the Republican party. . .end of sentence. I was going to write "he's the Presidential candidate of the Republican party," but there's no "of's" here. He is the Republican Party and he is running for re-election under a red sea of MAGA baseball caps.

Seriously, he is amazing and far, far more likely to crash-and-burn someday than his aged and sometimes creaky opponent. 

Oh, yeah, one more thing. He's plain-and-simple nuts. He's unable to control himself. Just this weekend he told whoever was listening that he has 500 million in cash. His lawyers, just a day or two earlier, said, under oath, that he didn't. 

Have no fear. Gird up your loins because Donald will find a way out, and when he does, some evangelical preacher with a on-line church and a hot podcast will announce to his thousands of parishioners, once more, that the fact that the man just keeps going is proof he's not 'of this world'--he's the MAGA Christ. 

It'll happen because it already has, more than once.

Grab the popcorn, take a seat, and get ready for today's show. Well, be sure to take the garbage out. 

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42



“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; . . . 

I first heard the line years ago from my wife’s grandmother, who I knew only for a few years as a rather elegant woman with a radiant crown of silver hair.  I don’t remember the occasion, but I’ll never forget the comment because it seemed so out of character for a fine old Christian matriarch.  “When bad things happen,” she said, eyes almost averted, her head shaking slightly, “they always come in threes.”

I had no clue where she got that idea, nor why she believed it.  Grandma Visser, whose people were hearty Calvinists for generations, could not have pointed anywhere in scripture for that idea, as she well could have for most of her foundational beliefs.  But this ancient bit of folklore—does it have pagan roots?—never fully left her psyche, even though she probably read the Word of God every day of her life.  “Bad things happen in threes.”  She wasn’t—isn’t—the only one to say it or believe it.  Google it sometime.

 Can it be true?  I don’t know that anyone could do the research.  But it must have seemed a valid perception for generations of human beings caught in the kind of downward spiral that David must have been in when writing Psalm 42.  And, as we all must sadly admit, often as not perception creates its own realities.

Is it a silly?  Sure.  If we expect it to be true, we may be silly.  But the sheer age of that odd idea argues for some ageless relevance.  Whether or not it’s true isn’t as important perhaps as the fact its sentiment has offered comfort and strength to human sorrowers. 

 True believers expect something more than they’ve already gone through, some additional misery if they have already got stung twice.  By repeating the old line, Grandma was steeling herself for the next sadness, anticipating that three would mean the end of sorrows, at least for a while.

 My guess is that the ancient folk wisdom finds a place in the human psyche not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting:  it brings order to chaos. Sad to say, there are three, but at least that’s it.

Interesting, I think, that Eugene Peterson uses the word chaos in his version of this verse:  “chaos calls to chaos,” he says.  And he’s just as right as anyone, I suppose, for it’s impossible to claim biblical inerrancy when it comes to a verse like this. The KJV says “waterspouts” where the NIV says “waterfalls,” wholly different phenomena.  The fact is, nobody really knows what specifically is meant by “deep calls to deep.”

 And yet everyone who’s faced a march of consecutive sadnesses knows very well.  “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions,” Shakespeare says in Hamlet, an even more depressing assessment than Grandma Visser’s.

We really don’t know what David means here, but many readers of Psalm 42 somehow get it. Our lives on occasion feel like Thomas Hardy novels, when things simply seem to get worse and worse and worse, and don’t get better.

There are no vivid pictures embedded in the line “deep calls to deep,” but that doesn’t mean there isn’t meaning enough for most of us to find ourselves therein.

We can’t avoid the painful reality of the soul that’s sliced opened to us in Psalm 42:  the singer who believes in the Light but sees nothing but darkness around him.

And maybe, thankfully, what’s there is the outline of a third bad thing

Friday, March 22, 2024

Morning Thanks--an old friend

People who love Wendell Berry--and they are legion--don't read him for his masterful plots. Often as not, Berry's love is only secondarily for what happens in a story; his love is making characters live. When he's good, and he's always good in my book, what he adds to your library (and your world!) is real live human beings, each of whom are worth knowing. In his novels, you discover their marvelous humanity. 

That "marvelous humanity" is in short supply it seems, so stumbling on a Wendell Berry novel means stumbling on characters who, through thick and thin, in some perfectly fallen way, show you truly rich--that very "image of God" that Berry would say dwells in us all. Few writers create such characters--another, by the way, is Marilyn Robinson.

For me, reading Jayber Crow was a long-standing obligation. I'd promised, long ago, to read it, when a friend told me he thought Jayber Crow was the very best book he'd ever read--and that man, Terry Vanden Berg, was a librarian. His praise overflowed with religious conviction. Jayber Crow was simply overwhelmingly good--"You have to read it--you'll love it."

Those weren't his last words by any means, but they were, if I'm not mistaken, his last words to me. He died on the street, when a heart attack took him long before it might have. He was out jogging.  It may well be that his untimely death makes me think his great reverence for Jayber Crow were Terry's last words to me.

No matter. It took me a quarter of a century to read the book this librarian told me was the very best novel he'd ever written. No piece of fiction could possibly live up to that kind of billing. We all suffer similarly: someone says, "you HAVE TO see" a movie; so you do, and you can't help thinking it didn't rate that kind of praise.

But then, to say I expected more glory from Jayber Crow is off the mark too. It's a fine book, a beautiful book, by all means worth reading. But the fact of the matter is, I enjoyed Hannah Coulter more. It's hard to decipher why, I suppose, and maybe I should simply say there's no accounting for taste.

But let me wander into this a bit. Jayber Crow tests the limits of what I might call "presentational theater," of listening to a chorus or an observor or a stage manager guide you through a story. The undeniable beauty of Jayber Crow is Jayber Crow, the man, in large part because he possesses what I'd call heavenly wisdom. He is an orphan, someone educated by his own passion for ideas and books, a kind of stranger in the world, a man whose lifeblood appears to flow only when in the presence of a woman who is unequally yoked. Jayber Crow spends most of his adult life quietly and passionately in love with a woman already married. The novel's surprise resolution is perfectly sad, which is to say, perfectly beautiful. I liked the novel greatly, but I loved Hannah Coulter.  

After a fashion, the novels are brother and sister. They all grow up around a small community fictionalized as Port William, Kentucky, a very small town surrounded by the kind of blessed countryside where a fully-fledged agrarian like Wendell Berry can grow. If you've never read Wendell Berry, it may be difficult to believe that he actually builds a community, but that's what he does--and in a series of novels all titled by characters' names. 

Berry loves flourishing community, and therefore loves the people who create it--people like Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow, as well as the men, women, and children around them. His concerns are with the soul really, the human soul, and his conviction is that men and women who live in community have separate lives that can, in that community, truly flourish. He doesn't write cartoons; his characters fall into deep valleys and wander into dark shadows, but finally their lives are rich. They flourish. 

Terry Vanden Berg couldn't have been wrong--Jayber Crow was the best novel he ever read. It was right up there for me. I can sing its praises, just not as convincingly as he did.

Once upon a time, sitting in a dorm lounge at Dordt College, Terry was reading over a paper of mine. I was a freshman. I'm quite sure I'd asked him to proof. He was an English major, two years my elder. He likely drew out a red pen. "Not knew here--you have to say knows. All the way through, you've got to correct your verb tense," he told me. "Always remember, when you write about a story or a poem, 'literature lives'--it's present tense, always present tense. Literature lives."

That's what he told me, years earlier, when I needed to understand what I was myself feeling--somehow literature lives. Always present tense. 

That too I've never forgotten. 

This morning's thanks are for a librarian and a reader, a man named Terry Vander Berg. 

______________________

Here's a fine 10-minute talk on Jayber Crow by Russell Moore.  

Thursday, March 21, 2024

City Champs!


So I just so happened to sit on a steel chair set up directly beneath the basket on the north end of the court last week at church (we're worshipping in a school gym temporarily), and I couldn't help thinking that that rim looked twenty feet off the earth--waaay up there.

I hadn't really looked at a basketball rim from beneath it for a long, long time, and it just seemed impossible that one night at a gym in Orange City, Iowa, during warm up layups, on the court of our rivals who we all knew would beat us, I was somehow hyped enough to get up and over that rim and actually stuff the basketball. (I doubt such an event myself, but don't smudge a dream.)

There I sat beneath the bucket, thick black bands up around my left calf to keep a brace in place beneath my left foot, a limb which no longer appears to cooperate when my body asks it to. I don't walk well, not well at all, although the brace keeps  my limp from being advertised. It doesn't help that I couldn't really imagine myself shooting a basketball or rebounding or moving downcourt on a fast break--no matter, that rim seemed impossible.

I spent years playing ball, stopped slo-pitch when I was almost sixty, even though at that age I likely slammed more big fat pitches out of the park than any of my teammates. It just was time. 

Two days ago, I walked into the indoor athletic field at Northwestern, on my way to a workout designed for this new condition of mine, and watched as a softball coach hit grounders to a couple of infielders. The sound of the bat on the ball sounds nothing at all like it did years ago, but I stopped, stood and watched, wishing, just wishing that the coach would see the old bald guy with the brace and offer me the bat. I'd have given anything for fifteen minutes hitting grounders.

It would be impossible for me to tally the hours I spent on a basketball court. Add in a baseball diamond, and we're talking about most of my life. 

All of that and more, and then a sweet ex-student sends me the picture up top from my teaching days in Wisconsin. That's me in the sweaty Calvin College shirt--and no, I didn't go there. I remember the team that won the Monroe (WI) City Basketball League Championship that year, 1971, I think. We were a tough bunch, that square man in the middle knew how to muscle the ball into the basket. He wasn't quick, wasn't graceful, but get the ball into him in the pain and he bulled in to score.

For a long time I had a little individual trophy--we must have each got one. I think it's gone now, tossed finally in one of our attempts to slim down, and I remember the picture too well. It was in the Monroe Times, a daily, and I loved it being there, not necessarily because I was so proud of our win but because--I can hardly believe I'm admitting this--because I hoped that some Calvin grad would see it, someone of the tribe I knew as my people would recognize the peculiar name of the college--and call me, just someone who knew the name Kuyper.

I love remembering those two years in Wisconsin, loved it because I loved my students, one of whom sent me that picture when she saw it in a display at a birthday party for the guy who'd get ball in the paint and somehow muscle it in. This party was, of course, at a bar--it's Wisconsin after all. A recent college graduate, someone who left the fold angrily in fact, I had a lot to learn.

When I remember back to that time today, I remember the students--it's hard for me to have to admit that they're all, long ago retired at this time, just as balding and paunchy as their four-years older teacher. But I also remember the loneliness, stark and painful loneliness that I felt, something of an alien.

It's painful even remembering that, but honestly what I remember about that picture just now sent to me from one of those students from long ago, is wondering if maybe some Calvin grad in Green County, Iowa, would look at it and pull out a phone book. 

It's not that I had no friends. Besides, kids really adored me--they still write. But what I remember, what I can't quite forget, is loneliness. Sometimes things looked, even back then, as if they were somehow far out of reach. 

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Songs and Stories from the Falls


Henry James once said of the English novelist Anthony Trollope that "His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual." 

That's the kind of fine line that makes you sit back and spin through it again. Whether James is right or not is a judgment I'm not qualified to make, but I can't help feeling what James might be talking about shows up in a passage Trollope penned about "the falls," the only ones that matter really, the Niagara Falls. 

Now, don't be mistaken--Niagara Falls is in no wise "usual." Its three separate falls span the border between Ontario, Canada, and New York state, and empty the Niagara River at a rate of almost six million cubic gallons of water every minute. Nothing about the Niagara Falls is "usual." Some claim that kind of immensity pounding into the Niagara Gorge can be heard as far as forty miles away. 

Here's what Trollope, this master of the usual, said about the Falls:

…To realize Niagara you must sit there till you see nothing else than that which you have come to see. You will hear nothing else and see nothing else. At length you will be at one with the tumbling river before you. You will find yourself among the waters as though you belong to them.

Then there's the water's sheer divinity:

The cool liquid green will run through your veins and the voice of the cataract will be the expression of your own heart. You will fall as the bright waters fall, rushing down into your new world with no hesitation and with no dismay: 

Oh, yes, and here's the spirit too:  "and you will rise again as the spray rises, bright, beautiful and pure. Then you will flow away in your course to the uncompassed, distant and eternal ocean…"

Phew. But then, I'm sure Niagara Falls (where the three are one) prompts every mortal soul who takes the time to sit and stare at its eternity of water, then rise into some timeless transcendence, not a particularly difficult thing to do, by the way.

A boat tour at the Falls uses an ancient myth to advertise, goes by the name of "The  Maid of the Mist."  The almost ageless story belonged originally to the Haudenosaunees, a local Native people who long claimed one of their own, a young woman suddenly widowed, depressed and lonely, took it upon herself to push her canoe into the Niagara River and willfully plunge over the falls to her death. 

Once she heard the roar of the falls, she prayed to her god to make her death easy, or so the story goes, and he did more than that: he saved her, even married her off to one of his handsome sons. Don't know if Trollope heard this one when he was at the Falls, although if he did, he may well have been even more ecstatic. 

One more chapter. The lovely maiden, now a wife, amid the pounding somehow hears the anguish of her people back up top the falls, then gets permission to visit them and warn them, which she does successfully, thereby becoming a savior of her people, "the Maiden of the Mist." 

But then, how about this one? Harriet Tubman, who almost single-handedly saved as many as seventy enslaved people, many of them by way of the Underground Railroad, used to bring the newly freed over the vast and newly built suspension bridge, right there at Niagara Falls. She delivered the suddenly freed, including her parents, to St. Catharine's or Chatham, to Canada, where finally their shackles fell blessedly away. 

Josiah Bailey must have heard that immense roar of the falls as the train he was taking came up on the old Suspension Bridge. But, Tubman said, he wouldn't look up, kept his head in his hands, or so she wrote in a memoir.

Finally, when Tubman knew they'd passed the halfway point on the bridge, she shook him, grabbed his shoulders, and told him they'd made it--he was out, he was free. This man Josiah Bailey stood right then and there in the train, and started singing on that suspension bridge. 

“Glory to God and Jesus too,
One more soul is safe;
Oh, go and carry de news,
One more soul got safe.”

And didn't stop singing that song till he got off the train, even drew a crowd of admirers while he sang, Tubman said.

Anthony Trollope first visited America in the early 1850s, and stayed only for a short time to visit his mother, who'd moved to America sometime earlier. So it's unlikely but not impossible that Trollope was here in 1856 when Harriet Tubman brought Josiah Bailey into freedom, which means you can't help but wonder what more Trollope might have said or how he would have said what he did, if he knew that right above him on that newly constructed suspension bridge, four slaves from Virginia were being brought into freedom. I wonder what this "master of the ordinary" might have added to what he had written had he heard Josiah Bailey's song amid the tumult and the roar, because it's amazing, isn't it?--how music stays in the soul?

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Just a little bit of Buechner

Frederick Buechner is someone whose work I wish I'd met long, long ago. For years, I've heard people I know and trust speak so very highly of him, you'd think he'd contributed to Word himself. Smart, funny, thoughtful, rich and wide in breadth, Buechner's reputation had soared in my mind even if I hadn't taken the time to read him. 

I have now, although not extensively. Barbara and I have used a book of meditations of his that was just wonderful. Somewhere behind me on the shelves, I've got, unread, Godrick, a novel, I think, and I read a little bit of him every day.

A friend of mine told me his laptop gets a shot of Fred Buechner every morning. Sounded like a great idea, so I signed up. 

This one came about a week ago.

A theologian I respect once said at a conference that I attended, a conference where she was a speaker, that no true Calvinist can say he or she hasn't flirted wildly with universalism. When I read this chunk of Frederick Buechner, I was reminded of that line and, smilingly, my own flirtations. 

Descent Into Hell

 

 

THERE IS AN OBSCURE PASSAGE in the First Letter of Peter where the old saint writes that after the crucifixion, Jesus went and preached to "the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey" (3:19-20), and it's not altogether clear just what spirits he had in mind. Later on, however, he is not obscure at all. "The gospel was preached even to the dead," he says, "that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God" (4:5-6).

 

"He descended into hell," is the way the Apostles' Creed puts it, of course. It has an almost blasphemous thud to it, sandwiched there between the muffled drums of "was crucified, dead, and buried" and the trumpet blast of "the third day he rose again from the dead." Christ of all people, in hell of all places! It strains the imagination to picture it, the Light of the World making his way through the terrible dark to save whatever ones he can. Yet in view of what he'd seen of the world during his last few days in the thick of it, maybe the transition wasn't as hard as you might think.

 

The fancifulness of the picture gives way to what seems, the more you turn it over in your mind, the inevitability of it. Of course that is where he would have gone. Of course that is what he would have done. Christ is always descending and redescending into hell.

 

"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden" is spoken to all, whatever they've done or left undone, whichever side of the grave their hell happens to be on.

 

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words