2019 Easter Reflections
Blessé mais vivant
Dear Family, friends, and followers of this blog.
Nancy and I wish you all a joyous and blessed Eastertide. Whatever opens your heart and mind as Spring comes on us, we hope it raises your sights, opens your arms, and gives you hope. (Skip the following if you like!)
Some thoughts I’ve been gathering might help our rites of spring to spur us to both action and contemplation:
Our only hope is the frail web of understanding by one person of the pain of another. (John Dos Passos)
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles. (Walt Whitman)
The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea. (Isak Dinesen, pen name of Karen Blixen)
The creative imagination can move in two directions: it can find a way or it can invent an alibi. (Chuck Peek)
When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about. (Haruki Nurakami
from a note written to us by our friend Colby Kullman)
Nothing is little in God’s service. If it once have the honour of that Name, it grows great instantly. (George Herbert)
An Easter Reflection:
As most of you will have read, devastation continues to surround us here in Central Nebraska. We’ve joined the other parts of the world experiencing freak storms, and ours have caused flooding to an extent we’ve seldom if ever seen before. Many whole communities were marooned for a time, and all around us, farmers and ranchers experienced crushing losses of land and livestock; some will never recover, for others it will take years. The estimated damage is now being figured not in millions but in billions of dollars. We will all feel the repercussions in the price of beef and bread, pork and poultry.
Yet, all along I-80 from Kearney to Grand Island, sandhill cranes in abundance could be seen in the skies and fields as late as Holy Week, their nine-million years of migration uninterrupted and undisturbed by our disasters, their cacophony calling “this, too, shall pass.” And their call is matched by the voices of victims assuring their neighbors in interviews on the weather reports that, “this is Nebraska…we’ll bounce back…it’s what we do.”
All this came just in time for David Brooks’ Nebraska tour, with stops in McCook in Grand Island, arranged by the Aspen Foundation through the good auspices of Jeff Yost and our Nebraska Community Foundation. Brooks did not fail to note the character of folks who live out here and make our churches, schools, businesses, and communities what they are. A few of them are pictured, sitting at a table in McCook’s Bieroc, among them Matt Sehnert (owner), Cloyd Clark (civic leader well known across Nebraska), and one of the people featured in Brooks’ follow-up article, Steph Graff.
It is no longer possible to believe in the kind of “everything in every way is getting better and better” progress our Nineteenth Century forebears believed in. Nor are our rural communities immune to all the ills communities are prey to. We need reminded of that from time to time. But if you have ceased to believe in any kind of progress at all, then get a glimpse of the kind of community life you find in any episode of Game of Thrones and compare it with the kind of community life we know in rural America across these Great Plains.
Come together, as we did recently with the members of the Anderson family as they mourned the loss of our great friend and their patriarch Ken, celebrated his life, and remembered his great heartedness, and handed him over to God. You could do far worse than to model a set of national virtues on the sentiments and behaviors so vividly present in this gathering.
As the Book of Common Prayer proclaims, “Even at the grave we make our song Alleluia.” Elsewhere, we have been reminded of the universal truth that the French have proclaimed in the wake of the tragedy of Notre Dame: Blessé mais vivant. How instructive that the word for wounded so resembles the word for blessed.
This is not just a matter of personal sentiment or private piety. It is the motivating force of “this is us…we bounce back…it’s what we do.”
As a teen, growing up in the era when polio was still a huge scare for many and a hard reality for too many, I was one year named chair for the Teen March of Dimes. Seeking a way to make more money for the cause than we usually netted by pitching coins into baskets during the half time at basketball games or by filling our coin slotted cards with dimes, I hit on taking our little “iron lung” banks to the local sale barn and leaving them on the bar and café tables. What a haul! From hard-pressed rural Americans in the middle of a drought.
True, there have always been a few very rich farmers and ranchers, but for the more realistic picture of agriculture, read Ted Genoways’ This Blessed Earth, the 2019 selection for both One Book, One Nebraska and Iowa Reads. See what it is really like and then reflect on how it was farmers and ranchers who filled those banks.
But then, thank you uncle Walt, a miracle. The Jonas Salk vaccine appeared, polio was eradicated where we all lived and by the Sixties we had Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine. The vaccine was available and affordable because Salk and others involved did not try to get rich on it, and the March of Dimes, having out-lived FDR’s reason for supporting it, did what can-do people do: it celebrated its success and then re-purposed itself into other ways that continue to bless millions of people. Just ask the blessed!
To engage in re-purposing is an act of hope, faith, and charity all rolled into one. That’s why, just after resolving not to take on anything new, I agreed to do the voice-over for a new video on the history of one of Kearney’s landmarks, formerly the Frank House, now the Frank Museum.
As the video notes, for years the house told the story of the Franks and the early economic boom expectations of Kearney, all of which came a cropper in one of the depressions before the Great Depression.
But the house itself was eventually repurposed—as the headquarters and staff
residence for the tuberculosis hospital.
Very little of that story was told for years, but now the house itself
has repurposed itself into a vehicle to tell this bigger (and much more
successful) story, a story that involved people we knew when we first moved to
Kearney in 1977, people like Margaret Brown and Lola Nutzman.
Repurposing, whether of institutions or of our lives, is the practical application of the great pattern of all history, of all life: Death and Resurrection (or as Ricard Strauss titled a piece, Death and Transfiguration—perhaps sensing that the Transfiguration is an Easter story told early.) The cynics have one story: death. Half the story! The whole story is Death and Resurrection, purpose and repurpose, devastation and recovery, Richard Rohr’s disorder and reordering.
The first green sprouts have peeked out from under the little that remains of our banks of snow, the kids have poured into North Bend and Wood River to cart away debris, the trucks are delivering loads of drinking water, and March Madness was as mad as ever.
May you all know joy and blessing, peace and purpose,
Love,
Chuck and Nancy
News of family and friends
A dear friend, daughter of dear friends, is recovering from a bad bout with cancer. Another had a scare but got a good report. Other good friends are coping with sickness and decline. If you are getting on in years, this becomes more and more your life.
Like many others near him, Harlan’s school had to close for a while due to the storms. In rural Nebraska, students and teachers live in homes scattered across the countryside and flooded roads and bridges out wouldn’t sustain travel. Noelle and Harlan will richly deserve their trip to Belize in May when Papa and Nanny get to have some quality time with Brody and Rowan.
George had wanted to get to Kearney for dear friend of the whole family Ken Anderson’s funeral, but a delayed flight out of Milwaukee made him too late for all his connecting flights, so he had to cancel. Glad Noelle and Harlan could make the trip. But Laura Grace did get to take Will, Greta, and Huck to the space museum in Chicago—witnessed by a photo of Huck in a junior-size astronaut costume—not meant to be worn and hard to get off with its hanger still in it! George got to play in the Father/Son basketball game with Will, and managed not to dislocate his pinky finger until the last few seconds. And we got a great picture of them all, taken for the Mount Olive congregation directory. Meanwhile sports continue for Brody and Rowan is working two jobs, a restaurant and a hardware store.
George Winston was in Kearney April 19 and a week after we’ll also take in KCT’s “Leading Ladies” with friends Linda Anderson, Carla Brooke, and Rosemary Northwall.
Right after Easter, we’ll get to the annual arboretum sale in Lincoln, have a visit with the Ptomey’s, and take in Dinner in Abraham’s Tent sponsored by the Tri-Faith Initiative and this year honoring our friend Woody Bradford. Then, in May we hope to be in Topeka for the Bishop Kemper School graduation, our own Bishop presiding and Dean Compier speaking. And we are planning our visit with friends Marty Townsend and Clark Swisher in Kansas City, even skirting flood damaged areas to get there. Later in August we’ll get to Iowa City for Nancy’s annual eye checkup. Either the Milwaukee Peeks will get down to Iowa City for the 100-foot water slide, or we’ll get on up to Milwaukee afterwards—or both!
Great lineup for the Eucharist at the Cather Spring Conference on Cather and Theater—independent scholar Jeanne Collins will give the homily, Dean Loya of our diocesan Cathedral will celebrate, and a new person on the Cather Foundation staff, Carla Post, is arranging for the Bell-issimo bell choir and other music. The conference takes place just as our good friend Steve Shively is retiring and moving to Lincoln from Logan, Utah. So eager to have him closer. And we’ll have there the chance to congratulate some of the good writers and artists featured in Tom Gallagher’s beautiful issue of The Cather Review.
We are also planning our trip east for the International Cather Seminar at Winchester Virginia. We’ll get to celebrate Father’s Day with Nancy’s brother Barclay (II) and Lorita on II’s birthday, and perhaps get to see III, Sutton, and the Coffee and Lenihan families. At the close, I will get to celebrate the Eucharist for the remaining seminarians at Christ Church, get in a lunch visit with the Stephen and Caroline Price-Gibson, friends formerly from Grand Island, and later that day a visit with Bob and Ruthie Schrott from college days at St. Mark’s in Lincoln. Cather-world friends will abound and we look forward to seeing them—Steve Shively, Daryl Palmer, Ann Romines, John Murphy, Andy Jewell, maybe even Joe and Leslie Urgo. We were planning on flying since Nancy’s brother has offered to shuttle us from Reagan to wherever, but now we are planning to drive and see friends and new sites along the way.
Meanwhile, I just gave a talk (“The Many Faces of Cather’s Faith”) for a wonderful adult forum at the Presbyterian Church in Hastings, and I’m preparing a book tentatively titled Nebraska: Conflicting Reports: essays and poems for (keep your fingers crossed) publication. Also (long hard winters are good for writers!), I’m a ways into working on an extended essay on race, something of a memoir, as well as launching with many friends a book project called Kearney Creates, a coffee-table compendium or boxed set on the arts in and around Kearney. Still, too, enjoying Torch Club, the weekly solve-the-problems-of-the-world Friday lunch group, writing my monthly blog, keeping up with our 12-Step recovery, and joining with the monthly gathering of south-central Episcopal clergy, including some ELCA’s serving Episcopal congregations.
Nancy and I hit Anytime Fitness three times a week, and she is faithful to her weekly yoga, prayer group, and monthly meetings of Kearney Action Network (KAN), a women’s group begun by our friend Janet Fox that interests itself in political and environmental issues. Nancy just joined its board. As the news junkie in our household, she keeps the lunk she lives with informed! Together, too, we’ve offered a little program once a month for newcomers to our parish and will repeat it in the fall.
I taught a one-shot Senior College Class on “The Sixties at 60 and My Ántonia at 100”—how changes in our times have kept the novel alive—and am in the midst of a six-week course called “What Were We Thinking? Staging the Sixties,” a study of three plays: Night of the Iguana, Royal Hunt of the Sun, and Marat/Sade—most of what I have to say cribbed right out of our classes with our late friend Pete Clark at the old Lincoln Community Theater or conversations with graduate student friends Denny and Jeanne Calandra, who appeared in some of these productions.
The rest of summer will bring a trip to Mississippi for the opening of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference…I’m not going to the conference (first time since 1987) but we are going down to spend a day or two with good “Yoknapatawpha” friends—the Carothers and Abadies, Colby Kullman, Theresa Towner, Terrell Tebbetts, Grayson Schick, the newly Mr. and Mrs. Greg Perkins—and worship at St. Peter’s where Jody Burnett is Rector.
So many enjoyable moments: train trip—visit with Tom and Susie Miles—Fr. Jeffrey’s first Sunday at St. Barnabas, Denver, burgers and fries with a gang we occasionally hook up with in Grand Island, breakfasts after church with Jack and Janice or any of the road trip gang in town or in church, Bishop Barker and his assistant Liz Easton’s visit to the parish, a breakfast with Teresa Houser when she was here to speak on human trafficking, phone calls with the kids, and our anticipated Easter feast with Karen Park, Katie Nickel, Martha Pettigrew, and Greta Sandburg.
Next year, no more idling. We plan to get busy!
Signing off,
Chuck Peek, alias Gaston in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile to be staged by Crane River Theater here June 6-9. (Interested in seeing a fun show? We have two guest rooms!)
Nancy: nancyjpeek@gmail.com 308-293-3386
Chuck: cpeek.cp@gmail.com 308-293-2177
2010 Fifth Avenue, Kearney, NE 68845
CAPeek.WordPress.Com (blog)
[Upcoming blogs: our usual Memorial Day RIP, some reflections on politics, travel, and Cathedrals]
And the usual poem…the cranes have done so much this spring to uplift our spirits that I’m pulling an old poem out of the archive for this year’s Eastertide reflections:
The Cranes at Minden Bridge: All and Spring
We catch nature best in flight,
But, ah, sparks among the stubble, red cropped cranes at rest
Where lamps are lit against the night!
Yet, flocks framed now by flaming sun, the sight
Against the water in that sunlight dressed—
We catch nature best in flight.
Sound of those ten thousand times ten thousands’ might
Rises off the fields whose soil is stardust God expressed
Where lamps are lit against the night.
From north and south they rise, take measure of air’s height,
Converge the water’s coursing east from west.
We catch nature best in flight.
It seems in their descent that all lost tribes unite,
Release us, watching, from our dark dividedness, arrest
Where lamps are lit against the night.
Bereft such splendor, nature’s fragile web in us is slight,
Yet we among its company are confessed
Where lamps are lit against the night.
We catch nature best in flight.
April 2, 1999 / Kearney, Nebraska
(Published in Pamela J. Jensen, Legends of the Crane, Sandstones Press, 2000)
capeek 