Tuesday, November 17, 2020            (today’s lectionary)
Memorial of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary
Stories on my 71st birthday
Behold, I stand at the door and knock. Listen for my voice and open the door, and I will enter and dine with you, and you with me.
Look closely through the branches of the rosebush. In the dark of night, illuminated from the inside out, Jesus knocks at a door without a handle. There’s no way he can get in my house unless I let him in.
I know your works, and you have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Be watchful and strengthen what is left.
That famous, cool painting by Warner Sallman still hangs in my mother’s bedroom. It was in the living room when I grew up. Jesus watched us from the wall during our evening Little Visits with God. I was the oldest, and once in a while, after awhile, I got to read the story to our family.
Dad taught me to work despite resentment, and Mom taught me to read. So I read Robert Louis Stevenson and yearned to be anywhere but where I was.
In Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?”
Stevenson had grown up, but I had not. And as the short biography of today’s saint Elizabeth of Hungary says, “We can play games very easily if we don’t have someone to challenge us.” For awhile Dad’s industry, thrust upon me morning and evening because the Holsteins wouldn’t/couldn’t wait, swept me away from the games I would have played.
I did what I could. I painted a white square on the wall of our dairy barn, and threw baseballs as hard as I could at the square, and caught them when they flew back at me. I rode my bike half a mile south on our blacktop road and traded baseball cards with Larry Poffenbarger. Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, all the Yankees.
But in the summer, sweating hard before we even started, Dad and I cut the weeds out of long rows of green, scratchy soybeans. We swept out dusty bins after the oats were gone. I freaked out in the corn crib as the ears of corn poured in and I couldn’t shout loud enough for Dad to stop so we could move the chute. Our green tractors hummed, Dad cut off his finger in a feed grinder, the cows waited to be milked. Weeds grew and had to be mowed on every fencerow. The work was never done.
The Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.
Dad bought me a pony, and I named him Champ. He would walk slowly away from the barn, and gallop pell-mell on the way back. Once I was thrown off onto a pile of posts with bolts and nails in them, and I got a tetanus shot. Every week I burned the trash and imagined I was a fireman, or an arsonist. Didn’t much matter which. Then when I was sixteen Dad sold the cows.
I am still writing that story. I was overjoyed, but Dad was heartbroken. He must have been. His family just wasn’t interested, especially me, in the cows or the milk or the routines or the business. I never went to the Logan County Fair to show our cows. In 4-H my leader Art Rohrer taught me how to develop my own pictures in his dark room.
So Dad and I went to Springfield and we bought a 35mm camera at a now-long-gone store on E. Monroe St. We dug out our basement and he helped me build my own darkroom down there. After a year or two I made one corner into a bedroom, as I grew up and away from my family.
I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. Remember then how you accepted and heard. Keep it and repent. When you are worthy, walk with me dressed in white.
The foundations were laid, and I am so grateful. When I traveled, when I played dangerous games with people and drugs and decisions, there seemed always something to come back to. I am so thankful to have a brother and sister. John and I wrestled, tickled each other and played a little baseball in the cornfield. Mary Kay and I shared stories and heartbreaks as we grew older. Our relationships now are strong and supple.
Have you got the ears to hear? Think the truth in your heart. Honor those who fear the Lord.
Mom’s sister (my Aunt Mary) went to seminary, taught Lutheran school, worked with prisoners and halfway houses, and took me one weekend to Chicago, where we visited the Pacific Garden Mission and then the next day had an elegant, finger-bowled lunch at the Allerton Hotel with our meals served on plates under glass. She wrote letters I still treasure about her faith that God was in the midst of all my life. Always, she focused on that rather than my sly malfeasance.
The Son of Man has come to seek and to save what is lost.
This is a day that the Lord has made. I want to be glad and rejoice in it!
(Revelation 3, Psalm 15, 1 John, Luke 19)
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