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.
Stuff in the Basement
Morning Thanks
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.
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
- NY Election Interference: (1) Hearing in courtroom 59 at 10 AM on (a) Trump pending motion to dismiss, in the alternative preclude witness testimony, and adjourn based on discovery violations (to last at least one day), and (b) the scheduling of a trial date, if one is necessary; and (2) DANY to finalize trial exhibit designations
- NY Civil Fraud Trial: Last day for Trump to post a bond of approximately 120% of Justice Engoron’s final monetary judgment, to stay that judgment pending appeal
- 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.
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.
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."
…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.
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:
“Glory to God and Jesus too,
One more soul is safe;
Oh, go and carry de news,
One more soul got safe.”
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 |