Gardener

A Few of my “Bests” from 2011 Best Fiction: · Olive Kitteridge and Abide with Me by Elizabeth Stroud · Hannah Coulter and A World Lost by Wendell Berry State of Wonder by Ann Padgett Best Non-fiction: · Desiring the Kingdom by James A. K. Smith · Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibbon · Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction by Richard Mouw · Mountain beyond Mountain by Tracy Kidder · Not Sure: A Pastor’s Journey from Faith to Doubt by John Suk Best Movies (Most of them from Netflix) · Incendies directed by Denis Vilenueve · In a Better World directed by Susanne Bier · Brighton Rock directed by Rowan Joffe · The Tree of Life directed by Terrance Malick · Of Gods and Men directed by Xavier Beauvois

I am a Christian. I have lived in America my entire life, and I have never experienced discrimination because of my Christian beliefs. Oh, I have received “looks” from time to time when I have made some sort of faith statement in a venue that was essentially secular. But nothing close to discrimination if by that word we mean a showing of prejudice against a particular individual or group. So I was somewhat put off by Nancy French’s statement in her conversation with Dr. Zylstra on KDCR, Dordt College radio last week that the people who most often experience discrimination in America are evangelical Christians. The statement was made in the context of a political discussion, and the example given was that often Christians are not given positions as judges because of their faith. I have heard this discrimination lament from others as well but I don’t believe it. How does one know something like this, that it is Christians who most often experience discrimination? Is someone adding up th

Good to hear from you, Gary. I hope you and your family are well. I agree with you that the church is obliged to care for the poor. My question is who picks up the slack when the church fails. It is a fact that the church does not (has not, has never) come close to meeting the basic human needs of the poor. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP and others were begun by the government because of unmet needs. I cannot imagine the degree of suffering and death that would occur if the government did not step in. Here are some words from John Calvin. If the church took them seriously, it might be able to fulfill its obligations to the poor. Calvin urged his fellow Christians to engage in "a liberal and kindly sharing of [what we possess] with others. . . . Let this, therefore, be our rule for generosity and beneficence: We are stewards of everything God has conferred on us by which we are to help our neighbor, and are required to render an account of our stewardship.

I really like what Dan says about the debates on health care being “dominated by affluent white people whose position in life means they have no idea about what life, sickness and death looks like up close in their cities.” Bill Moyers interview with Wendell Potter touches on this: www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch2.html I attended church in the poorest neighborhood in the city of Muskegon, MI, and served as a deacon in that church for a number of years. Most of our deaconate work involved neighborhood people who came to us in desperation because they had no money for food for their family—often because their welfare check was delayed for some reason. For several years I worked with a family—grandmother, four kids, amputee grandfather—who depended entirely on the social services system, but because the system let them down from time to time, we would have to buy them food or go to the DSS and advocate for them. I suppose those eighteen years at Bethany CRC, Muskegon had a great

“You go to Dordt College and you ask me that question?” Rick Santorum said to Ryan Walters, Dordt College freshman, when Santorum spoke in Sioux Center recently. And the question that Santorum seemed amazed at was this: “If not for our [government] social programs, how can we take care of our poor?” Santorum asked the audience who should take care of the poor, and the answer he got first was “the church,” and then, the answer he wanted, it’s up to “the individual” to take care of himself. Before we parse those three answers, I want to comment on Santorum’s amazement at Walters question. Why was he so amazed? I can only speculate. Santorum was amazed because he had been led to believe that Dordt College is a bastion of conservative Republican political views. Where did he get that idea? Again, I can, only speculate. Perhaps his colleague in the House of Representatives, Steve King, told him that. Perhaps the fact that Sioux County is called the most conservative county in the country in

Pastor Ames in Gilead mentions that he has thought about having a book ready at hand to clutch if he feels a heart attack coming on, “so that it would have an especial recommendation from being found in my hands. That seemed theatrical, on consideration. . . .” I notice that I have written in the margin, “How vain we all are.” It’s a bit like imaging the kind and flattering words that might be said at our funerals? Surely no one has done that! Still, Ames’ notion of having an impressive book in your hands when you die invites reflection. You would want something of “quality,” but also something that you really loved. He mentions the English metaphysical poets Donne and Herbert, Barth’s Epistle to the Romans and Calvin’s Institutes , Volume II. I’m not in his league. I might choose the poems of Hopkins or Dickinson or something by Wendell Berry or . . . Gilead.

I wrote this piece twenty years ago but never dared publish it anywhere because of the offense that some people might take. But most of those people are dead now, so I think I’m safe. Here’s how I came to write about nicknames in my hometown of Edgerton. I’m eating dinner at this restaurant with a friend from my boyhood. We both left town in 1960 and have gone back only for visits in the last thirty-five years. We’re sitting in this restaurant when somebody walks by, recognizes John, and stop to talk to him for a while. “Who was that?” I ask when he leaves. “Ed Bakker.” “I don’t think I know him,” I say. “Swivel-neck,” says John. “Swivel-neck Bakker.” “Oh, yeah,” I say. “He’s the guy who could look at the clock on the back wall of church and never move any part of his body but his neck.” “Yep. A hundred-eighty degrees from a straight ahead position.” “Old Swivel-neck Bakker.” That’s how it started. Now it becomes almost a competition to see who can remember the funniest nickname. John

Yes, Mason, I’m calling to ask Mr. King to oppose cuts to programs for the poor in the United States and in sub-Saharan Africa. To cut these programs is to say, “Let’em die" to millions of children and I know that Mr. King is pro-life and therefore . . . . What’s that? I don’t understand? When Mr. King says “pro-life” he means anti-abortion? Well, I understand that, Mason, but surely if he opposes the deaths of unborn children he would also oppose the deaths of born children. I see, yes, umhmm. So then it’s using tax money to save the lives of born children that Mr. King opposes? Un huh, so he thinks that churches and private charities are more efficient. Well, I suppose they might be, but does Mr. King think that five hundred dollars efficiently spent on the poor by the church will do more good than five million spend somewhat less efficiently by the government? What’s that? It’s too complicated for me to understand? You mean I’m just too dumb to grasp Mr. King’s pro-life

I made some disparaging remarks about the word spiritual in my last blog, and I suppose it was because I don't really understand what we mean by the word. What is a spiritual life? I know God is Spirit and I believe that the Holy Spirit in some mysterious way lives in me. But all that seems so inexplicable. Here's a quotation from Rob Mull's review of David Eaglelman's book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain: Many of the functions we ascribe to our core selves are dependent upon our brain functions. We're realizing how dependent our sense of ourselves is on our biology and its interaction with the environment. . . . We often talk as if we are separable from our bodies. Futurists want to download their thoughts and live forever online. Some faithful Christians look forward to discarding their shell of a body in favor of a spritual life in heaven. But if we could separate our thoughts and memories, even our sense of self, from our bodies, we would discover that

“How I have loved my physical life,” says old Pastor Ames in the novel Gilead . It is the kind of observation only an elderly person is likely to make. When one is young, he thinks he will always be as quick and nimble as he is at that moment, and therefore he cannot really reflect on how he loves his physical life. It would be like saying “How I have loved breathing.” Only after one has lost some of his physical abilities, can he come to a conclusion like that of Pastor Ames. But I’m 69 years old. I can say it using that present-perfect verb: How I have loved my physical life. Virtually all of it. (I have just enough pain to make me relish the fact that I’m usually pain free.) The great love of my youth was basketball. In high school I could never get my basketball shoes and jockstrap on quick enough before practices or games, couldn’t wait to get out there. It was all fun—the wind sprints, the shooting drills, running up and down the court shooting lay-ups at a hundred miles an hour.

One of the foundational tenets of my existence can be summarized in a line from a great old hymn from the 12th century written by Bernard of Clairvaux, “O Jesus Joy of Loving Hearts”: “From fullest bliss that earth imparts, we turn unfilled to the again.” I suppose I have been learning the truth of it my whole life, but I remember distinctly the moment when I knew in my bones the truth of this line from St. Bernard. I had had a really marvelous experience on a singing tour/mission trip to Puerto Rico, but then, reflecting on the experience, I felt a sort of emptiness, a longing for something else, a need for a new high. We live in the Shadowlands, C. S. Lewis said, and he meant by that, I believe, that our joys in this life are always muted by the knowledge that beyond the joy lies pain, death, loss. Yet even while muting the happiness, this knowledge contributes to it, for the happiness we feel is due in part to the underlying knowledge we have that it is transitory—the party will end

Mary Oliver says in her poem “The Summer Day”: I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With you one wild and precious life? It strikes me that this “paying attention” is one of the chief parts of praise—and prayer, as Oliver suggests. Marilyn Robinson’s central character in Gilead, Pastor John Ames, also pays attention, and while Oliver pays attention to the natural world, Pastor Ames, again and again, finds the behavior of people a source of delight and praise. He says, “When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it

The Anti-Bootstrap Religion I recently read a letter in the Sioux City Journal bemoaned the cost of government entitlements. By entitlements I assume the writer means programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Veterans Administration programs, Food Stamps, school lunch programs, and the list goes on and on. The letter writer is rightly concerned about entitlements. Anyone serious about cutting down the national debt has to recognize the need to cut back the funding to some entitlement programs. But the letter writer seems to have it in for all entitlement programs. He expresses the belief that everyone ought to swim on his or her own feathers without help from the government or anybody else. “We start with nothing, and no one owes us anything. Parents graciously give,” he says. And he concludes by saying, “America was built on self-reliance. It’s time we return to that value.” He’s wrong about parents and wrong about America. Parents owe their children food, clothing, she

A while back I said that I thought the novel Gilead by Marilyn Robinson would make a fine devotional book. Take this paragraph, for example, from page 27-28: "There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after rain, and the tree were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberence, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of it now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. . . . This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attent

I did not see Jesus Christ Superstar—the movie or the musical—when it first appeared in the sixties, and I have never felt any desire to see it in the almost fifty years since. But a friend who saw it at Stratford’s Shakespeare Festival this summer raved about it, and since my wife and I were planning to stop in Stratford for a couple of plays in early October, we thought we would book some tickets. Easier said than done. The play has been sold out for almost its entire five and a half-month run, and the only tickets my wife and I were able to book in August for an early October date were two single seats with obstructed visibility. We grabbed them. What accounts for this old (1969) rock drama’s immense popularity now, we wondered. Is the audience comprised of a bunch of old coots hungry for a nostalgia buzz? Or is there, perhaps, a legitimate Jesus hunger in the culture? We got to the theatre early and sat on a bench near the door in the lobby as people entered (people-watching is its

An Open Letter to Cal Thomas Dear Cal Thomas, In my early years as a college English instructor at a Christian college, I would receive in the fall a mailing from a Christian organization (I have forgotten the name of it) urging me to have my students enter a contest to write an op-ed piece that presented a Christian perspective on a current issue, included a Bible text, and was published in the mainstream press. The winner would receive a significant monetary prize. So I had my students attempt to write such an op-ed piece—and I even submitted a piece myself one year. But neither I nor my students ever won. Most years, as I remember, you were the winner. You were, apparently, the gold standard for Christian op-eds. I have read your columns in my newspaper over the years, but a funny thing happened on the way to the present: your columns became less and less recognizably Christian and more and more bitter, fearful and negative. Often it seemed that you were concerned much more with pro

October 16 Single-Heartedness Not content with having spent all summer pumping out giant crookneck squash (some weighing more than seventeen pounds), this old (in vegetable time) squash plant continues her work as blithely and confidently as if it were early June instead of late October. Wide green leaves flutter on the fence, small squash curl fetus-like under warm green leaves, and three bright yellow blossoms, full of purpose and ignorance, grin into the late afternoon sun. They do not know that the television soothsayers have looked into their bird entrails and seen hoar frost on tomorrow’s lawns and death’s wilt and shrivel on every growing thing.

I see my last blog entry was March 21, five months ago. Well, Rip Van Winkle slept for 25 years, so my five month snooze was a mere power nap. I remember a couple of years ago, a student asking me to recommend a book for devotional reading and I didn’t know what to say, for I am not a reader of devotional books. After a few moments of thought I recommended Lewis’ Mere Christianity , a book I have been going back to my whole life, a book that continues to surprise, inform, challenge and delight me. I also recommended Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing about Grace . And I might have said the Psalms, a book that has been a steady presence in my life for most of my 69 years. Lately, I have been re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the best novel of the decade in my opinion, and it has occurred to me that the book makes for wonderful devotional reading. (Yes! A novel for devotional reading.) If the purpose of a devotional reading is to bring about reflection on matters of faith, to

In a recent news item in my church magazine, The Banner , I read about a newly elected member o f the House of Representatives who said when asked why he had run for office, “I’m not satisfied with the world my children are inheriting and am adamant about cleaning up the mess that has been created.” Ah, I mused, a Christian politician who recognizes that we are called to care for the creation, to clean up the environmental mess that our wasteful, consumptive lifestyle has created. But I wanted to be sure so I did a little background check and to my dismay read that this Michigan Republican endorsed the party position on environmental issues. I know what this “party position” is because the news lately has been about the Republican budget cuts, especially the gutting of all issues connected to the care of the creation. One of the first things the Republican controlled House of Representatives has done in 2011, ostensibly to cut back on President Obama’s budget, is to propose a budget

It is astounding how much time and money our modern culture spends on clothes and astounding how much clothing most people possess. Go to yard sales and flea markets (or your own closet) if you have any doubts on this matter. In my reading of Walden this morning, I noticed that Thoreau devotes about 6 pages to clothing--the reason we have it and the superficiality of our deep concerns about it. • “The object of clothing is first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness.” • “We are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility.” • “Who would wear a patch . . . over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do so.” (Comment: I cannot even imagine what Thoreau would say about the modern tendency to buy worn out jeans, a behavior where “utility” has entirely disappeared and the only thing that matters is that influenti

Nobody likes Chicken Little. Nobody likes a prophet of doom. I doubt that even the doom-sayer enjoys his gloomy message. So here’s my dilemma: What if I believe the sky is falling down and what if I believe that we can do something to slow it down? Should I just shut up about it? I’ve decided to walk the tightrope between annoying people to death with doomsday talk and shutting up entirely. Here’s the deal. Bill McKibben in his book Eaarth —as I have noted before in this blog—gives ample scientifically documented evidence of the fact that our old earth has been so compromised by the glut of Co2 emissions spewed out by our post Industrial Revolution lifestyle that it is no longer the same planet it was 40 years ago. But he also suggests ways that the inhabitants of the high polluten’ countries could live to slow down their consumption of fossil fuels and thereby slow down the warming. But it will require a dramatically different way of living for all of us. Do I wan

" A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." One of the most surprising non-occurrences in the wake of the shooting injuries and deaths in Tucson at Gabby Gifford’s “meet your congresswoman” event has been a serious discussion of gun rights. It seems that the entire “public nation,” from President Obama to the press in all its forms, has simply accepted as fact the NRA’s position that the Second Amendment guarantees to individuals the right to bear arms. Even liberal MSNBC TV commentator Chris Matthews began a discussion of the gun issue recently by saying, “Now I know that the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to carry guns. . . .” But this interpretation of the Second Amendment is not the traditional interpretation. Most legal scholars throughout much of the twentieth century—believed that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of states to form militias—

When I was nine or ten years old, I went to a father-son banquet (with my dad, of course) in my home church. It was a fad of the time designed, I’m sure, to teach boys manners and create some forced quality time between fathers and sons. This, in a culture where most fathers spent “quality time” working with their sons on their farms every day! What has happened to this quaint bit of Christian culture—the father-son, mother-daughter banquet—I’m not sure. I haven’t heard of any for years in the Christian communities I have lived in. In fact, I never attended one with my son who is now 37 years old. In any case, what I want to remember here is the “entertainment” at the banquet, a lecture by a Christian Reformed pastor from Rock Valley who had been a POW in the Korean War. Well, if anyone at that time worried whether this preacher would be able to hold the attention of a bunch of little boys—not necessarily something folks worried about in those days—he need not have worried. The

“Let us spent one day as deliberately as nature and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing,” Thoreau says somewhere in Walden. I don’t know if I could spend a whole day as deliberately as nature—I imagine myself as a tree, for example, doing little more than rustling in the wind and engaging in photosynthesis—but Saturday morning I set out to live as deliberately as my two-year-old granddaughter, Corrie. I took her to the College Rec Center and turned her loose. She spent a lot of time running about on the large gymnastics area in one corner of a room—a raised semi-soft surface for exercises and tumbles of all sorts. I sat on the surface and watched her, chased her, caught her and watched her some more. She was blissfully happy and, most of the time, in her own world. After about an hour (I know, if I were living as deliberately as a child, I would not have noticed how long we were there), we wandered into a racquet ball court where about 15 balls of var

For Peter Vander Muelen and whoever cares about Climate Change: I wonder if any of you at the OSJ have read Bill McKibben's new book Eaarth. McKibben, you may remember, wrote one of the most significant books on global warming, The End of Nature , about 20 years ago--and of course many other fine books on creation/science issues, but Eaarth absolutely knocked me off my feet. In it McKibben paints a picture not of what might happen if we don't act, but of what already has happened: "The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. . . . We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won't be the same planet, and hence it can't be the same civilization. The earth that we knew--the only earth that we ever knew--is gone." Now I suppose any of us who has been paying attention, had some sense of this, but his description of what has happened, a summary loaded with document

I have been walking and jogging in the Dordt Recreation Center about four times a week hoping, I suppose, to add a few “cubits unto my stature” even though scripture tells us clearly that none of us can, by taking thought, add one cubit to his stature or one day to his life. (Actually, when I finish jogging I feel as though I may have subtracted some days from my life.) Since I am usually in pain when I jog, I try to find things to think about that take my mind off the pain, and this morning, as I rounded the curve at the north end of the track, I heard a young woman say to an older couple, “She wants you to pray for her, she’s potty-training her child.” “What?” they shouted. “Pray for her potty-training,” she shouted back. Well, there’s food for thought. Are some things too trivial to pray for? Should we bother God with our pettiest concerns? As I try to think of prayers about trivial subjects that are recorded in scripture, I draw a blank. Hannah prayed for a child, no

Here’s a statement I hear rather frequently where I live and work: “Well, of course, I’m no ‘tree hugger,’ but . . .” and then follows a mild expression of concern about some part of the creation. For many people in my part of the country, being known as a “tree hugger” is a shameful thing. I’m not sure why they feel this way, but I suspect it grows out of a fear of being identified with people—“radicals”—who have chained themselves to old growth trees in an effort to prevent them from being cut down. Apparently this kind of behavior seems extravagant, all out of proportion, especially since the trees are owned by a company which seems to have the right to do with them whatever it wishes. Or maybe they believe, as one of my students told me, tree-hugging can lead to pantheism. Whatever the reason, “tree hugger” seems to have negative connotations. Wikopedia tells me it is “slang, a sometimes derogatory term for environmentalist.” But most environmentalists are prou