Manifesto

Who am I?

I am not the stocks in my portfolio, the balance in my bank account, my pay grade, my annual profit or loss, my bottom line, my credit rating, my debts, nor the cash in my pocket...

I am not the label in my suit coat, the slogan on my t shirt, the brand name on my jeans, the gems on my fingers, the tattoo on my skin, the style of my hair, nor the color of my skin...

I am not my philosophy, my world view, my theological scheme, nor my first principles...

I am not the tools in my toolbox nor the weapons within my reach...

I am not what I have learned, what I have memorized, my academic degrees, my GPA, my test scores, nor the university I attended...

I am not my career, my profession, the business I started, the company I work for, the contract I wrote, the clients I signed, the pay raise I earned, my promotions nor my prospects...

I am not the billboard's display, the critic's review, the newspaper's headline, nor the gossip's whisper...

I am not my gifts, my arts, my skills nor my unique abilities and insights...

I am not my inventions, my buildings, my fields, my farms, my barns, nor my stores...

I am not the films I have watched, the play list in my iPod, my Facebook site, the television program, the actor on the screen, the media forced my way, the magazine assertion, nor the book in hand...

I am not my present shaping, my time on the track, the reps I can lift, nor my athletic skills...

I am not my genes, my ancestry, my parents, my siblings, nor the family I have raised...

I am not my arousal, my virulence, nor my sexuality...

I am not what the doctor diagnosed, the scheduled medications, the test results, nor the prognosis...

I am not the physical pain I feel, the mood enfolding me, the emotion I display, nor the heartbreak I have known...

I am not the decades I have lived, the texture of my skin, the lines on my face nor the changes in my hair...

I am not my triumphs and my failures. I am not my errors and omissions. I am not my sins...

I am not the dialect that sounds out my speech...

I am not a sign in the stars nor the zodiac's product...

I am not the place on which I stand nor the place I wish I could be...

I am not the natural realm which surrounds me...

I am not my nation, my clan, my platoon nor my team...

I am not what this culture says I am...

I am not this body, these atoms, nor this material form...

These are only the clothing, the adornments and the burdens worn by this soul. What's left? What remains underneath when all these are stripped away? What would I put down on a resume I was going to hand to God?

Sometimes I think we are like a colony of animals who have inherited a dusty plane, and we invent little hills of dust to elevate ourselves above the flatness. Scrape the dust up in piles with our wings and then stand there on top, claiming our ground, insisting that each millimeter of altitude is a good thing, for we were made for elevation. We pick our pile, fight for it, market it, pass it on to our children, all the while calling it high and good deriving from it our identity. But wings were given for something else.

I would like to be able to put on my resume that I learned to fly. Just a little. And helped others fly even higher and better.

And flight, of course, is a metaphor for what we are when the power of life - real life - and the devotion of love momentarily meld in human existence. For love without Life is a Hallmark card - light and thin and sentimental. Life drags in something breathing and bleeding, something dangerous, wet, full of desire, something liable to break things to pieces. Life gives love muscularity in service, meticulous care in devotion, ferocity in defense, aggression in desire. Life without love is homelessness, a bright fire warming no one , a high flight with no destination, a clanging triumphal procession by a soul which has never triumphed over a single instant of its existence.

We have been taught to pick one dusty hill and stand happily on its summit, surveying the world from our unique vantage point, imagining an identity somehow derived from a good situation. And every such identity is limited, short-sighted, and ultimately dead, for the hills of dust can never be more than well shaped parts of a dying world. And if one insists on clinging to their hilltop identity they will ultimately remain alone - for the hill is never finished; it is never high enough, and it is always tumbling down, and everyone becomes an enemy threatening your absolute work. And the sound of wings heaping up the dusty earth forever sounds there, and no one will ever join the task of the dead.

Fraternity

I have been thinking about something that happens in the human psyche which is basic and instinctive, but at the same time quite profound - one of those occurrences when two pieces click into place with a satisfying snap, such that one knows that they were designed to fit together.

I am thinking about the coupling of the personal pronoun I with the transitive verb to understand. Not just the language use, but the mating of the concepts represented by those words.

Bipedalism, one hears, is the trait that lifted the heads of Homo sapiens. I won't deny that this is a great convenience, but I think the above conceptual association is the thing that really raises us off the ground. And I would add that the calculations and reasoning surrounding the claim need not be complete or accurate to produce the sanctifying result. The instinctive claim to understanding is enough, whatever nonsense Mssr sapiens believes he understands. He begins to scale the cosmos, the stars and nebulae becoming his handholds, the galaxies his stepping stones, and he finds himself eye to eye with beings very different from the animals walking the earth.

Nor can he easily go back, returning to the soup below to escape the angel's conversation. I understand I am but broth does not serve one well if he also believes broth has no claim to any sort of understanding. All is meaningless might serve, if one could limit his language and thought to expressions of fear and desire, but those pesky notions of injustice, propriety and truth continually ambush the organism. Like an infantryman deposited onto a beachhead, under fire and with an angry sea at his back, the only way open is foreword attack.

And pressing ahead, determined to grapple with the vast unknown that waits on the other side of understanding, the combatant will glance to his right, and to his left, and find that he is not alone, and that he advances in the company of his brothers.

Such is understanding, our status, and our university.

Legacy

Am I the old man now? The grandfather? Is there some prayer, some blessing, that I might offer which would secure the well being of this farm and those who name it as a part of their heritage? I know that I am not wise enough, nor good enough, to provide such a thing. My prayers are like hollow, empty things, despite my genuine assurance of the sufficiency and grace of our God. Perhaps I simply do not do nineteenth century faith behaviors very well...

Yet in the midst of this God finds a way to continue whispering to us. It was Sunday, about lunchtime, and away from the gentle chaos of serving up the meal I noticed Bess and Bryan and Chloë nested together on a couch, removed a bit from the noise. I heard Bess and Bryan's voices very quietly singing, bent over little Chloë, a little congregation of three, or perhaps I should say four...later I would ask what I had heard them singing, and they told me Saint Patrick's Breastplate:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,

Christ behind me, Christ before me,

Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me,

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,

Christ in hearts of all that love me,

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

The ancient melody like a whispering in the room, a quiet confirmation of the blessings that had been poured out upon that farm, generation after generation for some hundred and forty years...

confirmation that the great risks and human investment and extreme sacrifices stood like foundational stones, massive, still in place, unshakable. Their song took its place alongside the small and the great movements which make a farm, from the first furrow torn through the prairie to the construction of a tiny home to the harvests, the winters, the plantings, the loss of a son and brother, the autumn of those strong, sweet lives...Bess and Bryan's hymn held all these things, but also held a hope for what will come next; perhaps I sensed in this moment Chloë's generation, safe in the arms of Christ, protected, somehow, from the winds of trouble by the solidarity of this old farm.

Essential Mythology

Thus do we paint with over broad strokes these portraits of those we have never known, reaching for colors given to legends, framing our guesswork in gold, hanging it in the half-lit hallway where mythology visits like a regular and comfortable guest. Historically our living creations are malnourished and impoverished; even so they move through our minds and touch realities that no one else could ever touch, and thus haunted by breathing uncertainties we begin to breathe yet deeper still...for I have now held in these hands the antique skates a Swedish teen once strapped to her small feet, and I am able to imagine her gliding across her frozen lake as she ponders a new life in a new world, where a young man who promised his love awaited her...hers, too, was a mythology, a mythology of her future, and the futures which would grow up from that.. in which Chloe and I and all of us now walk, looking eastward from time to time, toward that land and that time from which she came, remembering, and imagining, as best we can.

"Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in daylight?"
"A man may do both. For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day."

Sanctuary

My grandfather Oscar cussed us all from time to time, usually when we were out in the fields working with him. Mild stuff as profanity goes, especially by today's standards, but it was a novel experience to us, weirdly fascinating and threatening at once. It added a spicy flavor to the hard rations of summertime farm work.

At mealtime, the big dinners, he would bow his head and pray. This did not happen at every meal; only the more formal dinners as I recall. His prayers were not out of a prayerbook, but simple, heartfelt, the great man's melodic voice nearly breaking to tears as he thanked God for what we had. These were powerful moments, and absolutely genuine, and I vividly recall their essence even now.

I saw no contradiction or fallacy as I beheld the two sides of the man, for I knew him. The Iowa soil on his boots and the coronary stain of sweat on the work hat, the encroaching blindness, the small luxuries he granted himself, the way he treated his animals and the way he tended his fields...I worked and walked beside the man who thus touched that small part of the world.

Now, suddenly, I am the grandfather. And the thing I find myself wanting to pass on to Chloe's generation, more than any material thing, is the awareness of these souls they can never know. As I never was able to know my great grandmother Clara, or great grandfather John, or my Uncle Carl...but I have their stories, their letters and books, and we have the soil they worked and the farm they built. And I find myself taking these little seeds of knowing and planting them in my imagination, trying to grow the person up out of that fertile soil; this is inevitable, I guess, and unfair, for what springs up cannot be accurate. But it is far, far removed from the desert of knowing nothing about one's past and the ascendants who built the world one inherits.

Something Old, Something New

Here, then, is a symbolism equal to all the great constructions to be found on this farm. Great barns and powerful machines and well engineered roads were all a part of our past, and ought to be seen and touched by my children, and their children, and thoughtfully measured from top to bottom...but we must measure the small parts too, for these tell us much about who we were, and who we are.

There is a sense of triumph here. Grasshoppers may have devoured the threads of the curtains Clara placed in the windows of that first small home, but they cannot devour the idea of transformation - in which a wilderness is transformed by something we so feebly have named home, and where a simple structure is transformed by the small particulars which render it beautiful. They cannot devour hope, and they cannot devour love; they cannot devour the spirit in a man who believes he can improve his world by means of intelligence and strength and hard work. Their notions of order and propriety and decency survived the grasshoppers and the blizzards, ill health and hunger, economic hardships and climactic extremes...the books and curtains being the outward manifestations of something very large, and very strong, in these Scandinavian hearts.

Clara's Skates

These are the ice skates my great grandmother Clara brought to this country from Sweden. I imagine her packing her trunk on the home place in western Sweden, her parents brokenhearted at her departure to another world, knowing they would probably never see her face again...perhaps with blessings, perhaps with severe Scandinavian imprecations not to give herself to such an impulsive scheme...what does one pack in her trunk in such a moment? What does one take along from a life she will never touch again? What are the seeds one brings along to plant in a new world where magical soil might allow anything to grow? We know she packed these old skates, marked with the W for Wennerstein, her maiden name. And she made room for the great lines of sleigh bells, spherical brass units of graduating sizes affixed to long leather straps, the largest a couple of inches across and singing rich deep tones below the cheerful chirping of the smaller bells...it was a heavy musical load which must have generated a muffled jingling all the way from that Swedish farm to the untamed prairies of western Iowa. And she must have brought lace curtains - the same curtains she lost when the grasshoppers swarmed across the land. Stories telling us about the plagues of locusts also tell us about the lace hung across the window, and perhaps just a little about the hand which hung it.