Gardener

     Lester De Koster (1916-2009) was a Calvin Professor and later, the editor of The Banner, the weekly magazine of the Christian Reformed Church.  As a Calvin prof he was sometimes considered liberal because of his politics, but as a Banner editor he was sometimes considered conservative, especially because of his opposition to Kuyperianism as developed by Dooyeweered. It is also worthy of note that De Koster had a deep and profound knowledge of the writings of John Calvin.      I am interested in his political ideas because of an essay he wrote in 1958 that attempts to answer a question that I am asked to answer from time to time, "Can a Christian be a Democrat?"  For example, when my grand-daughter was told by her Christian School teacher a few years ago that Christians are Republicans, she asked her mother (my daughter) "If Grandpa's a Christian, how can he be a Democrat?" (Or maybe she put it the other way around). I was happy to answer her question; I h

I Recognized the Mitten   as soon as I saw it, gray fuzzy leather and a wide wristband (to keep snow out) stitched with gold thread, horizontal lines crossed with V’s going up and down around the band. I must have dropped it there sixty years ago while checking to see if my glasses were in my pocket (they weren’t, they were lost again) as I walked home from school in mid-December.   Of course it’s not really the one I dropped—one of the many   I lost over the years— it was dropped by some kid, some forgetful kid whose mind was so full of plans for a snow fort or the plot of a Hardy Boy book or the wonder of sailing ships like the three Columbus sailed, some kid, one of hundreds all over the state who lost a mitten yesterday after the first snowfall of winter, kids who are constantly driving their mothers crazy because they lose their mittens and glasses and forget to take out the trash or feed the dog,

     An enterprising employee in an office area near my office has a small cache of candy and other goodies that he sells. The little business depends upon the honor system; you put your fifty cents in a plastic container and choose your sweet. The sign at the top says “Snoops Are Us,” and as I read it, I wonder if people who are not of Dutch background would understand, for snoepen is a Dutch word for sweets, candy especially.      They might, for when I check the Oxford English Dictionary, I discover that the first definition of snoop is “to appropriate and consume dainties in a clandestine manner.” And apparently there’s something sneaky about eating those sweets. For it is from that usage that the more common American use of snoop has developed: A snoop is “someone who goes about in a sly or prying manner.” He pokes his nose in where it does not really belong—but in a sneaky way. Sometimes, in fact, the snoop is an eavesdropper.      And what is an eavesdropper? The or

In Frederick Buechner’s first of three short autobiographies, The Sacred Journey, he writes, “Deep within history . . . is sacred history, is God’s purpose working itself out in the apparent purposelessness of human history and of our separate histories, is the history, in short, of the saving and losing of souls, including our own.   A child is born.   A friend is lost or found.   Out of nowhere comes a sense of peace or foreboding.   We are awakened by a dream.   Out of the shadowy street comes a cry for help.   We must learn to listen to . . . our lives for the holy and elusive word that is spoken to each of us out of the depths.” (4-5).   Identifying those moments where God was and is at work in his life, recalling the holy and elusive words he has been able to hear in his history, is the focus of this little book.   And in the book he advises readers to examine their lives to discover God working in their own sacred journey.   “Take out the album of your own life and search i

I am serving on a committee at my church whose mandate it is to create a worship statement.  And my particular assignement is to construct a statement about the purposes of worship.  So today I remembered this word from my book of words, Angling in the English Stream: Flabbergast is a word whose origin no one speaks about with certainty, though one source suggests that it might be a combination of flabby and aghast.   That works for me since it brings to mind a picture of a person with flabby mouth wide open looking totally aghast at what has just happened.   Flabbergasted.   As I researched this word, I discovered a related word: Flabbergastation, “the state of being flabbergasted.”   It’s a wonderful word, but it ought to refer to a place where one can go, a sort of service station, that pumps you full of high octane amazement.   Perhaps that’s one thing a church service should do—pump us full of amazement, the kind St. Paul feels when he exclaims in Romans 11:33:   “Oh the

A few years ago my college library replaced its old style bookshelves with new electronic shelves that run on tracks—three feet to the right, three to the left—and snuggle up to the shelves on either side so that when they all are parked properly, there is a solid wall of shelves for about fifteen feet and a single three foot aisle down which a reader might walk in search of a book.   It is a marvel of efficiency enabling the library to nearly double the number of books it previously housed in the same space.   With a push of a button, I can move as many shelves as I wish, enabling me to get to any shelf I desire.   Of course sometimes I have to move four or five shelves to get to the aisle where the book I am after resides.   But then I push the button and off the shelves go on their three foot journey.   What power! With my index finger I move a thousand books as if they were weightless. One of the small pleasures of my life from the time I was seven or eight has been browsing

I heard recently that conservative Christians, uncomfortable with Romney’s Mormonism, have been trying to twist and tweak the Mormon religion and/or Christianity so that in their own minds the Mormon faith can be called a branch of Christianity.   If that could be done, they could vote for Romney and feel good about it because he now, suddenly, would be a Christian.   It can’t be done, of course.   You can’t make the Mormon faith just another Christian denomination without changing both Christianity and Mormonism so much that neither would any longer be what it was.   If I as a Christian wanted to vote for Romney, I wouldn’t worry about his Mormonism. I won’t vote for Romney.     I simply don’t trust him.   Nor do I like his proposed policies.   But his Mormon religion does not concern me. I am, however, concerned about the faith of his running mate, Paul Ryan.   Although he is a member of the Catholic Church, Ryan has said that “more than anyone else, Ayn Rand taught me qu

The cartoon in today’s Sioux City Journal shows a man labeled NCCA pulling down a statue labeled “Culture of Football First.”   I certainly find some truth in that assessment of the Penn State conspiracy to shelter Jerry Sandusky and thereby allow him to continue to abuse young boys.   I just happened upon something I wrote six years ago when Dordt was devoting oodles of attention and publicity to its newly created football program.   In response to an email critical of my criticism of this policy, I wrote: “You know, on many college campuses, football teams act as if they can live by their own set of laws.   What promotes that?   Well one thing might be the inordinate amount of attention we lavish on them.” So, the cartoon makes a valid point.   Still, it seems to me that the NCAA is, to a certain extent, a pot calling the kettle black.   For it has done as much as any group to promote this insane sports culture that governs many colleges and universities. Having said that, thou

There’s an old cliché that says “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”   I have never found this idea particularly insightful or accurate.   Sometimes people who fail to learn from past mistakes simply make new bad choices.   And the verb condemned suggests that what people experience is always bad. Surely that is not always true.     But maybe what the old cliché really means to say is that our history—at least the significant events of our past—should be remembered because the act of remembering can be instructive.   And with that I whole-heartedly agree.   So does the Bible.   When the children of Israel come through the Red Sea, Joshua has each tribe take out a stone, twelve stones in all, and set them up as a memorial—a memory stimulator.   Jesus gave us the bread and wine and the ritual of The Lord’s Supper and told us to enact the ritual in remembrance of him—of his suffering and death.   There are many more calls to remembrance in both Old and New

Here’s a bit of advice from Fredrick Manfred: “Let’s start a cult in which we make heroes out of such ornery cusses as we may still have around—out of our lone wolves, go-it-aloners, dissenters, hermits, screwballs, aginers.   Such a fad, the fad of the ornery cuss or the oddball, might save us.   It is still a truth that the health of a society can be measured by the size and the vigor of its minority group. “In fact, I’d like to recommend that every village and town go out of its way to make sure it still has an ornery cuss in its midst.   At least one.   And should any village discover it doesn’t have an honorable dissenter around, I’d like to suggest that the mayor declare a state of emergency until such a citizen can be found.” A small college is a village, so a college ought also to have its dissenters and aginers.   Especially in the faculty and student body.   Among administrators it is considered treason to go against authority.   Administrators think of a college a

A pomegranate is a fruit somewhat roundish in shape, but not round like an apple—though the poma part of its name means apple.   The pomegranate is roundish but flatter than an apple—something like a football, but that does not quite describe it either.   It’s more like---I’ve got it—like a grenade.   Aha!   That’s it.   In fact, the word grenade comes from the second half of the word pomegranate.   Pomegranates are sometimes called grenades, for short.   To the inventor of the grenade—and who would want to take credit for that?—the shape of this devastating little bomb must have suggested the pomegranate, and hence the name.   But a huge irony lurks in the word grenade, for this instrument of death comes from a word that signifies life.   From the very earliest times and in many cultures, the pomegranate has been a symbol of life, of resurrection, fertility and plenty.   In Greek mythology, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, the goddess of grain.   Her daughter, Persephone

The word cruciform means in the shape of a cross.   Almost anyone could figure that out.   And if you heard that there was a class of plants called cruciform   plants, would you know what they were?   Perhaps if you are a gardener, you would.   You would have identified cabbage and broccoli and cauliflower plants as cross-shaped.   The young plants of these and other vegetables are shaped like a cross—specifcally, the Hugenot cross. Broccoli, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard,   baahk choy, cauliflower, radish, kohlrabi, collard and turnip greens are just some of these cruciforms.   All of them have been found to be crammed with anticancer power. To paraphrase a pharmacist I know, If we ate nothing but cruciferous vegetables and fish we would nearly put the pharmaceutical companies out of business. But we want to talk about their names.   Let’s start with broccoli.   It is the diminutive form of an Italian word, brocco, which means shoot or stalk . So it means little

God’s Care for the Poor -- Martin E. Marty The text for today’s meditation comes from The Wall Street Journal , a quotation provided by a major novelist, whose newest work was being reviewed. The quote, first: “The Lord commands us to ‘do good to all men,’ universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates, that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the images of God in them, to which we owe all possible honour and love.” The reviewer is Thomas Meaney, co-editor of The Utopian, who assumes that readers will be surprised to find that the author of that quotation, so typical of liberal Protestant rhetoric, “as improbable as it may sound, is John Calvin.” Not marginal to the Reformer’s thinking, this sentence appears in his classical, most deliberative, most studied and most frequently quoted book, Institutes of t

            I spent some time on the road the other day, and since it was April and the weather was warm and dry, tractors and farm implements were everywhere--gearing up on farmyards, already at work in the fields, and crawling along the highways.   Sometimes, when I get behind a tractor pulling a disc or a harrow or some other implement, I get impatient, especially if I'm going up a long hill.   I will occasionally pass on the hill in those circumstances, and, if a car is coming from the other way, that can be a harrowing experience.             You may have noticed that I used the word harrow twice in the previous sentence:   Once to designate a farm implement and once to describe a frightening experience.   Let’s look at harrow a bit more closely and also at some other farm implement words.             The first syllable of harrow like the first syllable of harvest comes from a word that means “to cut or shear.”    Harvest suggests the time of the cutting or pic

We were riding around, looking at some of the large new houses—mansions, actually--in town, when I said to my wife, “Some of these places are so large they must have drawing rooms.”   “Well, what is a drawing, and why is it called a drawing room?” she asked.   “I know it’s not a place where people draw pictures.   We read about drawing-rooms in English novels, but what, really, were they?” “And why do we call those little rectangular boxes where we keep our silverware or underwear, drawers?   For that matter, why do some people call their underwear drawers?” It was clear that in the ordinary words draw, drawer, and drawing-room, we had opened up a rich lode of etymology and so I will try to mine a bit of it here. The root word draw comes from the common Teutonic root dragen.   Its most basic meaning is to cause anything to move toward oneself by the application of force, to pull or tug or drag (note how this word also derives from the root dragen ).   The cowboy draws hi

                                                                Candidate and Senate As I look out of my office window, I see sky and the tops of trees.   That’s because a foot of snow sits on the outside sill of my window, blocking most of my view.   The world is blanketed in snow, giving off an incandescent glow; in other words, the world is white-robed.   In Latin that would be candidatus , white-robed.   Roman men who were seeking office had to wear white robes, candidates, to indicate to the people who saw them in the street that they were running for office.   This was before newspapers and TV, after all, and the people needed some way to identify them.   Of course, the symbolism of the white robe might be considered a bit ironic–at least if Roman politicians, like   some of ours, were not exactly snow-white in character or behavior. A related word, candid , has an equally ironic connotation when applied to certain political candidates.   Candid means “white,” but al

My name is Dave and I am a story addict.   Last night my wife and I went to see The Hunger Games, and in two minutes, I was hooked.   I loved it from start to finish and I could see it again tonight.   I read the books and burned through them like a fire.   Couldn’t put them down.   Good writing, great characters, great plot and thematic depth that yields a surprising richness of meaning.   One of the chief pleasures of my life from as early as I can remember has been the experience of being hooked on a novel or a play or a movie.   Sometimes I feel a sort of guilt that I care so much about these non-real characters that when I am in the middle of their lives, I cry or laugh with joy as I read or view, but the tragedies and joys of neighbors and friends often elicit far mere tepid emotional responses from me.   I realize this happens because I have submitted to the world of the story and allowed myself to be manipulated by it.   But still, sometimes it seems a bit silly to behave