Monthly Archives: November 2014

How do we say “thank you?”

28 Friday Nov 2014

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Todah, wado, efxaristo, danke, gracias, thank you, xie xie, salamat, grazie, mahalo, domo arigato, obrigado, spasiba, asante, cam on, medasi, gahm-sah-hahm-ni-da, dhanyavad…all ways to say the same thing among many more peoples and languages.

Usually these words call for an appropriate response. “You’re welcome” used to be the polite response in English. These days we hear an echoing “thank you” often, as if the “first giver” knows that the gift is being passed along in an endless series, popularized in the phrase “pay it forward,” in contrast to “pay it back.” The giver is not only glad to give; he or she finds reward in moving gifts along an endless sequence of giving.

Mrs. Veatch made that point to me in 1973, when she called our home in Iroquois, Illinois, from her home in Thawville and asked if she could come to visit. She had been my high school Latin teacher, but she instilled much more than Latin in all of her students. Latin was her base for sharing the love of learning and people. Her home was a library that became the start of a library for the village of Thawville and a resource for all of the area. She knew that my wife had just given birth to our second child, and with part-time work and graduate school almost finished we didn’t have much. She came bearing gifts.

“Don’t even think about repaying me,” she said. “I’ve already had my reward from seeing your accomplishments as my student. Just pass it on.” That was her consistent attitude, even as she faced the death of three sons in those years, and even as she faced her own illness and death. I have remembered her example as our opportunities to share with others became greater as the years have passed.

“Bitte” is a frequent response in German, “I beg” in English, which seems an odd idiom until we realize that the obligation to give is felt acutely in one who knows how much is owed to the others who have made giving possible.

the day the combine burned up

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

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I don’t know most of the details of this story. How much did the combine cost? A lot. What crop was Dad combining? Corn or beans. What field was he combining? The north sixty acres, that we called the Pacey place. What date, or time of day?  Who knows?  Daylight, in the fall,  when Dad was more than 75 years old. Someone may remember or have a record. What caused the fire? Could have been several different things. Dad had a fire extinguisher. I don’t know whether he tried to use it and finally had to give up. No matter. The big expensive John Deere combine burned up. Dad got off of it before he became a casualty. That was the most important part of the story, of course.

The other important thing about it was what Dad said afterward, “It was getting harder for me to climb up the ladder to the cab anyway.” Such equanimity. Such acceptance. Not just resignation to a fate that couldn’t be changed. He expressed some relief, a bright side, a positive outcome. I think he was actually grateful. After that he could hire someone else to do that job. He didn’t have to use that monster machine anymore, just because he had paid for it, invested in it, and needed to use it for the harvest. As much as he loved farming, some aspects of it had become a burden for a man who had started to farm shortly after he learned to walk. Good riddance to operating a combine, maintaining it, fixing it, climbing up and down on it.

There is not a bright side to everything. Often we are surprised to find it in an unexpected place, but there it is. Sometimes we can even say appropriately, “Burn, baby, burn!”

the old ugly rocking chair

24 Monday Nov 2014

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Many years ago my grandfather, Carl Warfel, entrusted me with an item of great value to him—an old rocking chair. He could not say that he enjoyed sitting in it. I had the impression that no one had sat in it in for many years. It was in several pieces, having come unglued. It was missing its upholstered seat. He could not say that it was good looking either. Black and red casein stain covered its parts in random patches, a stain that came from soot and iron ore mixed with sour milk. The colors had worn to dull hues, bare where hands and other body parts had rubbed them off. Its claim to value lay in the family story that this rocker had sat by the fireplace in a cabin near Charleston, Illinois, in the 1840’s and 50’s. The owner, a cabinetmaker and carpenter, may have fashioned this one-of-a-kind design, and the rare times his lawyer son visited, while riding his court circuit through nearby Charleston, his son would sit in that chair and call it his favorite.

So the rocker came to me, as one entrusted with a pearl of great price. Of his many grandchildren I was the one who had shown some interest in antique furniture and refinishing, therefore the natural choice for its stewardship or rockership. I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with it. My first inclination was to get rid of that awful black and red color, because the worn places revealed an unidentifiable wood of some quality, and the hand-lathed spools on back and legs and arms had charm. Fortunately no paint stripper or chemical that I had knew about could touch the stain. I say fortunately because those ugly colors date and locate the piece.

Since I did not know what to do with it, I took the remaining pieces apart and kept it in a large box where it sat for forty years. The chair challenged me to glue it back together, tung oil its wood back to a satin luster, and take it to an upholsterer for covering with a period fabric and pattern. No one alive could vouch for the story that came with the chair, but the thing is obviously old enough. Thomas Lincoln’s next door neighbors were my grandmother’s great aunt and uncle, and they may have purchased Lincoln’s household furniture when he died, but I have not been able to verify that family story.

Finally, in the year that I retired, I finished the rocking chair. Do you have any such prizes in your possession? Probably you are a better caretaker than I have been. Do you have a story worth telling, and can you vouch for it better than I? No object can mean that much, but sometimes with certain objects we can bear a testimony to values worth treasuring.

Our treasure should never be consigned to a box, stored out of sight and forgotten. Alas, that is where many people keep their stories and their valuables. The value is not available until you bring it out and put it to use, reassemble and try it out in daily life, and put the story into words and actions that echo the original experience, faint or dim or ugly though they may sometimes be in our rockership.

the welcomers

21 Friday Nov 2014

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“Eldon and I are your neighbors– a block north of your home. We’d be glad for you to stop in anytime. You are always welcome for tea.” What was left unsaid, but became clear later was the rest of the invitation, “We will be glad to adopt you as our own children, and your children as our grandchildren, for as long as you are here, and in our hearts forever.” The Johnsons were like that. They had welcomed the previous ministers at their church, and they would welcome succeeding ones.  

They gave an open invitation, which they always accommodated, with a few understandable exceptions when they were gone on a trip or in the midst of a project, from which they could always take a hospitality break. Retired from managing the local grocery business Eldon made time for fishing trips with the children, along with his other grandchildren, and games of pool in the den of their little house. They taught them to “chicken dance” and pick strawberries and other things that parents may not have remembered to teach. Eldon and Louise also seldom missed a worship service, taking their position in the front under the high pulpit. He had missed enough, he said, in the working years when the grocery required his attention.  

When many others did not invite visits and seemed to resent my effort to make a home appointment as too much of an intrusion on a busy schedule, the Johnsons were always true to their word. The teapot was always on. They had their own opinions about matters being discussed, which they expressed in considerate, thoughtful ways whether they were in disagreement or support. It was clear from the first that their mission was to make loving relationships. They also cooperated with the church’s decisions once made, and were usually available to help, even with hard projects like putting a new acoustical ceiling in the Fellowship Hall, or tearing out the wood floor to lay concrete. If there had not been another person in that community of such character (and there certainly were others), the time there would still have been wonderful. 

Louise gradually lost her vision, and Eldon became her caretaker as other health problems accumulated. She still wrote a note stating that they were enjoying their private “nursing home” and still kept us in their prayers. Eldon died suddenly. Louise lived out her final stage of hospitality in a nearby nursing home.  

As we approach Thanksgiving and Christmas we remember Eldon and Louise putting out the lights around their house, and a constant buffet spread of desserts and delicacies for all their guests. Like their Savior they will live forever, and not only in our “hearts.”

evidence of the multiverse

17 Monday Nov 2014

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Many memorable and, I hope, equally forgettable statements filled the airwaves this past election season (2014). Among them this comment by Joni Ernst stands out, “We have lost a reliance on not only our own families, but so much of what our churches and private organizations used to do. They used to have wonderful food pantries. They used to provide clothing for those that really needed it, but we have gotten away from that.”

In my study of string theory, I have pondered what kind of evidence would provide verification that we exist, not in a universe, as traditional physics has assumed, but in a multiverse in which an infinite number of universes coexist, as string theory posits. The evidence requires some kind of incursion of an anomalous alternative reality into the regularly observable reality of this universe. Soon-to-be-Senator Ernst’s statement provides that kind of incursive evidence, although it may fit better into a theoretical construct known as shoestring theory.

Truth to be told, I have spent more time studying history, and church history particularly, than I have spent on theoretical physics. We now live in an era in which more food and more clothing comes from voluntary and nonprofit organizations than ever before in history. This, today, is the era of wonderful food pantries provided by churches and private organizations, as well as meal services, overnight lodging and shelters, clothing distributions, funding for transportation, medical care, education, rental assistance, and utility payments. Altogether, this total of private assistance to the indigent, the working poor, the elderly and disabled amounts to a fraction of what our own and other governments provide for their citizens, but it still often means survival for many people. If the food pantries do not look wonderful, it is because their shelves empty so quickly.

During seven decades of life, I have seen, assisted, and started several programs of such assistance for people who needed them. I have examined the evidence of such programs in many eras of history from the earliest church through the Great Depression. No era has seen more concerted and voluntary action to provide benefits to others than our own era.

At the same time, the accumulation of wealth has also reached a pinnacle. The odd thing in this universe is that extremes can coexist without mutual recognition. Only when people do live in a different world can they assert that we once had wonderful food pantries and clothing depots and we have gotten away from that, therefore, the government must do less, and voluntary organizations and churches must step up in doing more, like they used to do. There never was a time in which they used to do more. There never was a time in which help for the poor—working or not able to work or not ready to work—was more needed than now, nor more need for governments to step up and assist their populations to secure their livelihoods. Wealth is present, but the wealth and the power that controls it are not distributed fairly. The era of fair and equitable distribution lies ahead of us, not behind us.

blowing in the wind

15 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by in Events, Running

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The day was very windy and I was running one of my favorite routes, three miles around the lake and up the creek. I enjoy the woods and trails, the limestone cliffs, rock shelters and caves, and the historic ford where ages ago the Cherokee detachments crossed on their way west, and before them, the Choctaw, the Seneca, the Peoria, the Lenape, way back to the Osage and the Caddo and who knows who else. Each of those peoples probably lived in this rich and pleasant valley longer than I ever will.

As I ran, huffing and puffing, I saw two women straining against the wind, at different points along the path, each woman with two leashes, one for each hand, extending straight and taut to a large dog. Two women, each attached to two large dogs. They looked to me like the dogs were serving as anchors, keeping each woman from blowing away in the fifty miles per hour wind gusts.

So, when I approached the first woman, I was about to speak my observation about the dogs being anchors, but she, seeing that I was about to speak, gave me one of those frowny looks, that said, “Don’t talk to me! I’m not in the mood!” So, I said, “Hi,” and went on.

I was approaching the second woman and her dogs, and she smiled, so I said, “Dogs make good anchors in this wind!” There’s not a whole lot of time to talk when you are running with a fifty miles per hour wind at your back. And she said back, “They’re taking me for a walk. I’m not taking them.”

Conversations between runners and walkers don’t follow a linear logic. I just took note that her observation made more sense to her than mine did. The leashes were taut because the dogs were pulling hard against the wind, pulling her along. She did not see herself as being anchored by the dogs so she would not blow away. Not that my observation was entirely wrong. It just didn’t match her interpretation. Perhaps we were both right. It was simply a matter of perspective.

When I was running against the wind, I would have been glad for anchors that I could count on, pushing ahead of me. Perhaps they were there. I just did not see them.

the coconut cuckoo

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

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A dear friend went to an art league benefit, which is a customary event for her. She is an aficionado of the arts, unlike me, a hopeless dilettante. There she was, surrounded by other sponsors and patrons, with an array of specially prepared foods, friendly conversations, and even some donated artworks that would be distributed among the attendees as rewards for being generous.

One work of “art” caught her attention—a coconut dressed in colorful feathers and painted to resemble some exotic bird, suspended from the ceiling. She examined it, and keeping her thoughts to herself, wondered what in the world she would do with something like that? At the same moment she heard her name being called as the recipient of a prize, the prize being the very same bird that she was looking at. The next thought followed in due course—who in the world could she give it to?

You have probably heard it said, as I have, be careful what you wish for, or what you pray for, because you might get it. Vice versa, it appears it can be said just as appropriately, be careful what you do not want, or do not pray for, because that is what you just might get.

Poor little pika

06 Thursday Nov 2014

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The pika is a species native to the Rocky Mountains. They’re also known as the cony or the rock rabbit. Small as a hand, thick-furred, short-eared mammals, they like the cold regions near the mountain peaks, and they cannot thrive when the temperatures warm up. Hence the problem develops as the climate gets warmer farther and farther up the mountain slope. The species begins to disappear as the pika are crowded into smaller territories by the increasing warmth, and where can you go when you reach the top? So they are in danger of extinction.

The territories of many species are shrinking as the human territory expands. Even more creatures are succumbing to changes in climate. It seems that homo sapiens (the “wise guys”) are taking over like a hoard of locusts, whether we plan to or not, consuming everything in sight. This is more than “having dominion over all living things” as Genesis 1:28 phrased it.

Human beings have a special capacity for compassion and understanding of other creatures– one another and all kinds of others. We can feel sorry…for ourselves but also for others. We can identify so much with others that we can put ourselves in their place, and grieve the threats of extinction. As they disappear we may rightly wonder whether we are setting the stage for our own disappearance, when we are no longer entertained, instructed or assisted by many of the beings who have kept us company in God’s ongoing creation. We may be pushed off the top by forces of our own making.

Poor little pika. People have the ability to act as well as feel. Do we need to go to the mountains and collect the remaining colonies and move them to yet higher ground on taller mountains? Do we build refrigerated, climate-controlled zoo facilities than can keep colonies alive until we figure out how to restore them to a natural environment?Or do some things just have to go when their time is up? Do we have to keep moving on to higher ground until there is nowhere to go but “up” in another way?