Awe and wonder, Creation, inspiration

Potato Miracle

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That huge bag of potatoes from a membership store I love but will not give free advertising to didn’t get used up (the challenge with these bulk items) before the red potatoes started softening, sprouting, and maybe even rotting. I had vaguely understood that potatoes grow in the ground. What would happen, since it was now late spring, if I put these spoiling potatoes underground?

I researched. I was told I needed seed potatoes and warned of many evils that would afflict the potatoes if not properly treated. Bury them deep enough, space them right, do all kinds of time-honored orderly things. As a non-gardener except for the occasional what-will-happen-if-I-try-this passion project, I had no patience for all this folderol.

So I went to our compost pile (33 years old  but also not managed according to any more orderly protocol than throwing the next pile of nothing but no-meat/fat scraps on top plus occasional soil if critter action seemed evident). I chopped up the vegetation growing on the least wild left side of the  pile and dug a trench five inches deep and five-ish feet long.

I dumped the spoiling potatoes in the trench. I separated them out a little to sort of fit what the experts said but to do better would have required two trenches, too much ado.

I ended up with a row of jostling potatoes and an occasional few millimeters of soil between. Then I covered them up with the dirt/compost from the trench.

A week later I realized another few red plus some white potatoes in the refrigerator where they’re not supposed to go (so they don’t turn green and poison you with too much of the glycoalkaloid solanine) were sprouting. Okay, time to try a tad closer to recommended protocols. More trenches, but this time in a raised bed in front yard except often shaded. Instead of just throwing whole potatoes in the ground, I looked for promising eyes, cut the potatoes as per directions, and semi-reasonably spaced them.

So: the sort-of-rightly planted potatoes did sprout nice plants. But while we were on vacation deer ate lots of leaves. The plants keep regrowing but so far have only produced skinny roots.

Oh, but in the just-throw-’em-in bed: a root (actually a tuber, part of the stem but underground, I eventually learned) with this pea-sized growth on it. Red. A potato! An honest-to-God potato! I had just been planning to query “How do potatoes grow” because it seemed a murky process, whatever was going on there underground, especially since the raised-bed plants were just doing normal plant things: stems, leaves, roots.

But here. That tiny red nodule. God be praised. In this era twisting through the daily chaos and evils that make my dear once-sunny spouse Joan quote every morning the wisdom of a work colleague who regularly says “We are a failed species”: a miracle. A sign of an alternate reality. A first fruit of the inbreaking realm of the divine!

A nother eek later, after being long uninspired to write anything, it occurred to me “Potato Miracle” would be a fun piece. So I needed a photo. I went digging. Still only raised-bed roots. Compost: No cute pea potato. But then: a large-ish blueberry of a potato. Maybe the pea had grown?

I’m still not sure exactly what’s supposed to happen when. I read that over time the plants flower and wilt and die. I’m seeing a combination of what seem to be rotting stems and still-flourishing ever-larger plants. So only the coming weeks will teach me the full process.

But: I kept gently probing the earth near the maybe-once-pea-now-blueberry potato. And found more. All larger. And more. Still larger. Were they still growing? I don’t know! But I couldn’t bear to leave these first-ever-my-own-grown potatoes maybe to rot. So I gathered them and am eagerly looking forward to a meal of them this week.

A shout-out to San Francisco Mennonites Stephen and Karen Kreider Yoder, who have been doing some fine writing in the Wall Street Journal on the retirement journey. Joan is calling herself fully retired. I’m saying semi-retired because I still run Cascadia Publishing House while streamlining it. The Kreider Yoders, not too distant in age from us, keep giving wise pointers about this stage.

Much of their reporting involves the day-to-day engagements with where to live, mobility, health, downsizing,  money. One factor often implied and occasionally more explicit–as when Stephen ponders the “vacuum” as work activities are left behind–is how deeply all of us need meaning. I find this a huge issue as I make ever larger transitions from what was once a more public life to a more private existence unfolding on a smaller scale.

I’m not sure any of us can fully know the precise ingredients of the meaning we uniquely need. But I’ve been surprised and tickled to learn what potatoes can contribute. For one, they don’t care about what Jim VanderHei of Axios calls  “post-processable velocity—a speed of change exceeding the ability of any individual, company, market or government to fully absorb, understand and respond to it in real time.” Potatoes just take their time, their 60-ish to 120-ish days, no matter how crazily everything else is maybe rocketing off a cliff. 

For another, finding out that they do this mind-boggling thing of both literally turning themselves underground into something I love to eat and becoming a metaphor for what we may find when we dig through the dirt of life brings its own rich meaning, This is meaning much larger than a pea, a meaning that keeps growing as I wait to see just how many potatoes I will harvest this year and how big they will turn out to be.

That was my ending, I believed. Except while I was getting this ready to post there were some days of both rain and sun, the deer-eaten raised-bed plants kept growing, and I thought why not see what’s under there now. Lo, I found a red swelling smaller than a ladybug. But there it was. And then some marble-sized swellings. I still can’t believe this happens.

Raised bed potatoes

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, writes on Substack and blogs at Kingsview & Co. He is trying out integrating and complementing his blogging with Substack posts.

family relationships, Humor, inspiration, Marriage

If You’re Going to Treat Me Like a Dog

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Photo of barn for blog posts by Michael A. KingI respect and value the many social media tributes people often offer each other on their anniversaries, and I cherish my beloved Joan Kenerson King after 48 years of marriage. But I can’t quite resist the temptation to tell a story as my tribute. If I dare risk echoes of what was said of Aslan the great lion in the Chronicles of Narnia, that he was not a tame lion, one of the lessons I’ve learned to grasp and then mostly to savor over the decades, after some initial stupefaction, is that neither did I marry a tame partner:

So back on that spring 1978 day I’m still in shock that marriage means you have to care about the other person and be with them all the time etc. etc. Plus she just doesn’t walk fast enough in Paris on our honeymoon. In a huff, I energetically cross a street, Joan gets stuck on the other side of a busy crosswalk near the Arc de Triomphe (I have a picture), and I’m like good grief, woman.

So, osteoporosis still a distant nightmare, I powerwalk on to the Paris Metro. Except behind me as we enter the station filled with très élégant et sophistiqué Parisiens there is barking. I look back. I am stunned. Lagging far enough back to be heard throughout much of the station is my beloved. WHAT the?!!!&*###$?

“Well,” says she, not just cool but icy as a cucumber, “I figured if you were going to treat me like a dog I’d act like one.”

At anniversary #48 the word tame still seems not quite to apply. But I’ve come to grasp that the husband in this equation did deserve what he got. And, as one of my daughters said after being reminded of this story and celebrating her mother’s self-assurance at such a young age, “Dad, you met your match. She was The One.”

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, writes on Substack and blogs at Kingsview & Co. He is experimenting with integrating and complementing his blogging with Substack posts.

grace, inspiration, popular culture, worship

Grace Ready to Flood Us: Mary Gauthier as Soul Guide

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Concert audienceHow I heard of Mary Gauthier I forget. Somehow in the ever-changing flood of CDs and Ipod tracks and MP3s and, of all things now again, vinyl records. But what above all caught my attention was that here was someone who believed in and offered grace. The years and even the decades have passed and Gauthier seems only to double down on grace with every move our culture makes to double down on violence.

In her memoir Saved by a Song: The Power and Healing of Songwriting (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), she says this quite directly when she reports being in prison for a wake-up DUI in her late 20s. She tells her attorney she doesn’t care what he does if it gets her out:

I didn’t know I’d had a spiritual experience in the jail cell. I wasn’t aware that Grace had entered my life. But from the moment I truly saw myself laying on the floor of that holding cell, my life changed. Brutalized by the truth, I hung my head and surrendered.

So when I ran across a notification that she would be playing at our local concert venue, I did what I rarely do: stirred myself to jump immediately on tickets and even buy some for friends. The night came, and as the world outside unfurled its ever more violent self, inside Gauthier, no stranger to suffering and trauma, created something as close to a worship service as I’ve probably experienced outside of a church–and more worshipful than church often is.

Concert audience

There were a number of key factors. For one, in her faded jeans (I think torn but maybe my memory is just filling in that expectation) and white sneakers (that I do remember, or running shoes, or whatever), under a face ever older, hair ever grayer, Gauthier testified to the reality that you don’t have to be a billionaire to offer something to the world.

For another, though you can never really know when a performer is performing a performance versus sharing truly from the heart, she seemed more reliably to be driven by heart and soul than I’ve experienced in a long long time. Especially in an era in which the very concept of being true to anything other than destroying bad others and demonstrating why you should be running the world and acclaimed for it has turned into something like a mysterious dialect we can no longer enter.

I’m reminded of the Greek I myself now struggle to grasp even though I learned it briefly almost half a century ago. We know there might still be wisdom and insight and how-to-live-our-best-lives guidance in the old languages of virtue, but our minds can’t quite decipher them anymore.

In contrast, song after song Gauthier and her partner, Jaimee Harris, opened us to suffering but always to wrap it in grace. Grace and grace and more grace. The virtues of forgiveness, of mercy, of love and kindness larger even than each day’s daily hates. Just the titles of the songs speak volumes: “Dark Enough to See the Stars. Rifles and Rosary Beads. Stronger Together. Drag Queens in Limousines. Our Lady of the Shooting Stars. I Drink. Between the Daylight and the Dark. Walking Each Other Home. Mercy Now. . . .”

What I didn’t know at the time, but found out after searching the Internet for more of Gauthier’s history, is that she is, as the title of one of her albums puts it, “The Foundling,” the baby her mother gave up and whom Gauthier longed for year after year, chasing in so many ways what she felt at some deep, not fully knowing level, had been taken from her. She yearned for home, as her songs often describe, and particularly for a primal home in her birth mother’s heart.

Finally in the early 2000s she not only found her biological mother. She phoned her. And her mother, as Gauthier reports, just could not, could not, find a path fully to reengage this daughter she had given up for adoption in circumstances that were probably horrifying for her. Now Gauthier had to go on not only with the sense of abandonment she had long felt but also with the reality that her biological mother simply was unable , as Jesus says so hauntingly of a Jerusalem falling into nightmare, to take Mary under her wing.

It pierced my own heart to learn that Gauthier, beloved by thousands or maybe even millions for her from-the-soul singing and, in effect, ministry to all of us who yearn within our broken selves for grace, did give her mother her website URL and enough clues to learn about this woman, her lost child, if she chose. But apparently, and Gauthier offers grace once again in the telling, even knowing more about the child she had once borne was too terrifying for her mother to do more than touch the holiness then mostly draw back lest she be burned.

In Saved by Song, Mary describes the effect as

when I woke up, right before I opened my eyes, I felt an aching emptiness as though in my sleep I’d gone back to the orphanage and sat alone in my crib again, waiting, hoping that she—my mother, myself?—was coming back.

But Mary would need to let a spirit “Bigger than parental influences or biology” bring the healing she ends up testifying to and singing into being in “The Foundling” album. As Mary puts it,

I’d found my birth mother, but she did not want to be found. I called her one last time and asked her if she would please tell me who my father was. She said she didn’t remember. I knew she was lying, but I also knew she was terrified. It was time for me to let go, move on.

Mary’s mother, who told Mary she’d had a beautiful marriage with the man she married after having Mary but he died and she had his “grown kid that I raised on my own . . . and I can’t do this with you” wasn’t able to welcome this foundling, this other child.

Yet what a blessing Mary could have been to her and maybe even was, in ways we can’t know. Though she never felt able to meet Mary in person she did stumblingly connect, even sent her a picture of herself and of her sister (Mary’s aunt) with a short note concluding “We are both short. I have a brother. He is also short. Love, Yvette.”

In the picture, says Mary, there is a cake that says “Happy Birthday,” she doesn’t know for whom, “but it wasn’t for me.” Her birthday, Mary observes, was always her least favorite day; “I was starting to understand why.”

How do I, I wondered, how do we each, I wondered, struggle to let in the grace so ready to flood us? Such mysteries of life I guess will follow me and us into the grave and beyond. In the meantime, what a gift Mary Gauthier gives us by herself wading deeper and deeper into the grace and the mercies we need now, as we long for home and for what we can’t even name even as we can, says Mary as her memoir draws toward its close, know one “simple, vital truth: we are kindred with other souls.

“We are not alone.”

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co. He is experimenting with integrating and complementing his blogging with Substack posts.

Creation care, Sustainability

Support for Lawn-Care Laziness

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Kingsview & Co blog postI have had interesting conversations for decades with friends whose philosophies of lawns are much more proactive than mine. I love our lawn at the edge of woods–but I love it best as a kind of tame version of a meadow in a national forest, left to be as wild as possible while still being sort of recognizably lawn-ish.

Of course laissez-faire on behalf of loving God’s earth and creatures by turning lawn deserts into something better can also be interpreted as lack of oomph for lawn care. Hence I will confess to some gratitude that even the part of my vision motivated by laziness seems increasingly and conveniently to be supported by the research. I was particularly tickled to see this support for not even mulching our leaves this year.

Lawn with leaves under white pine

This suggests that the leaves at the edge of the lawn, under the white pine, do not, after all, represent chores still to be completed this autumn. Rather, the work—nurturing and celebrating life!—is already in process.

I had thought that what I’ve long done, mulching leaves and mowing outward concentric in circles to blow them to forested fringes–after implementing no-mow May, extending periods between mowing, and never never never treating the lawn chemically–captured main steps for managing autumn leaves to nurture instead of destroy or evict life. But in her New York Times article, Margaret Roach proposes that even then I wasn’t going far enough, noting in her exploration of lawn studies how life fares in lawns cared for too well, so to speak:

Rake up or blow away those leaves, or shred them with your mower, and the results plummet — as do the essential ecological services those organisms perform, including key pest-control roles by the spiders, parasitic wasps and certain beetles.

Even composting, which certainly seems preferable to bagging leaves for landfills, has its drawbacks, given that “a well-managed compost pile achieves temperatures that will kill some organisms beneficial to your yard, Dr. Ferlauto said.”

As Roach reports,

“We actually have a lot more things emerging than I think many homeowners think we do,” Dr. Ferlauto said. “In a square meter of yard where you leave your leaves, there’s on average almost 2,000 insects that will emerge over the course of the spring.”

By my very very rough calculations, this means that in the fringes I’ve mowed so we can get to our compost pile without walking into snakes, I’ve actually probably destroyed 40,000 or so insects. And God knows how many I’ll save through my new plan not to do more messing with these messy but now so representative-of-life leaves. From laziness to life supporter. I’ll take it.

Lawn with trail mowed through leaves

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, writes on Substack and blogs at Kingsview & Co. He is exploring expanding his writing to Substack, where a version of this post first appeared.

popular culture, Writing

AI, My Neighbor? by AI Michael with Michael A. King

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Photo of barn for blog posts by Michael A. KingRecently I noticed that I hadn’t written a column for quite a while. When I pondered, I didn’t come up with any ideas that compelled me to write. The one inspiration that emerged was to see what ChatGPT would write if I asked it to provide a guest column.

My instructions to GPT-5: ” Review Michael A. King posts at https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/ and write a funny column about AI like them.” The only interventions I made when GPT-5 responded were to say “Yes” when asked such questions as whether to refine the column for submission to KIngsview & Co, set it up with a submission e-mail, make it copy-and-paste, and so forth.

This is the result. I’m not hugely taken with the “insights” of this GPT-5 LLM (large language model) lifelessly echoing “living” writing and being perhaps programmed to be self-serving in its invitation not to “panic about the machines.”

On the other hand, if I spent some hours or days training the model, the results would keep getting better and sounding more like IRL (in real life) Michael. I didn’t do that because a.) it seemed a waste of time, given that I don’t intend to replace myself any time soon (though based on a story I saw just as I was writing this it looks like plenty of writers will use themselves less as human creators and more as polishers of AI); and b.) given that even on first pass I can at least glimpse my actual style here, I wanted the LLM writing to continue to feel somewhat lifeless lest it show I’m already passé. Herewith my AI Michael alter ego.

AI, My Neighbor?

Sometimes I imagine artificial intelligence as a new family that just moved in down the street. At first, they seemed polite, kept to themselves, and only occasionally borrowed sugar. But lately they’ve been showing up at community meetings, volunteering for committees, and, suspiciously, remembering everyone’s birthdays.

Sermons and Sentiment Scores

AI is uncanny because it can mirror us. Ask it to tell a bedtime story, and it weaves one. Ask it to draft a sermon, and it produces outlines. Yet something is missing, the way a mannequin wears a suit but never breathes in it.

I imagine preaching about mercy while some algorithm in the balcony quietly rates me: “Sentiment: 0.87. Keywords: love, neighbor, kindness.” Not exactly the Sermon on the Mount — more like the Sermon on the Spreadsheet.

Nuisance and Gift

Still, like all neighbors, AI can be both nuisance and gift. It may accidentally mow down the daisies (spam emails galore), but it might also hold the ladder when we’re repairing the roof (reminders, research, connection).

Perhaps the invitation is not to panic about the machines taking over, nor to worship them as prophets of efficiency. Instead, it’s to remember that what makes us human is not cleverness but care.

The One Algorithm That Matters

AI may echo our intelligence, but it cannot imitate mercy.  And mercy, I suspect, is the only algorithm that truly saves.

So here’s my hope: that as we make room for these curious new “neighbors,” we don’t lose sight of the old calling — to love, to forgive, to laugh, and to live as though wisdom is more than what a machine can calculate.

[Your Name] is a writer and [your role—teacher, pastor, editor, etc.] who ponders the odd dance between faith, culture, and technology. While AI can draft outlines and rate sermons, it still can’t fold laundry or bring a casserole to the potluck — which is probably just as well.

—This AI column was was hosted by Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, who blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo. He’s hoping a few readers may still think his personally written or IRL communications are better than this one. 

gratitude, inspiration

Expiration Dates for People and Cherry Tomatoes

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Photo of barn for blog posts by Michael A. KingThere is nothing new under the sun, says the prophet in Ecclesiastes; this post is evidence of that. Who knows how many millions or billions of people over the millennia have said the same things?

The complexity is that it feels new to those of us experiencing it. A zillion words don’t get some things into us until the realities themselves get into us.

So the old new thing I’m pondering is living with expiration dates. Both key loved ones and I now have some statistical prognostications of how long we might live. Oh, it’s not precise and could vary by years. But you can look up X condition and be told that if you’re 70 your average life expectancy might be Y years. Or if you’re 65 with condition B, your average longevity might be Z more years.

Talk to the doctor, and she may nuance: unless this criterion is met or that complication is involved–then maybe it’s this much longer or down to this many months. But typically, many doctors seem to add, each person is unique and we’re giving you state-of-the-art care and we have lots of Plans B, C, or D if we need more than Plan A so we’re a long way from needing to treat you as a statistic.

And from a technical, medical standpoint, until or unless something recurs or introduces itself, that may be that. Now what? Here let me try to redeem an inclination which has caused at least some mild tensions with some cherished persons: my interest in seeing sell-by dates as almost always about how long this or that product is in its ideal or at least usable condition rather than when it must be trashed.

For example, I will here disclose to my dear spouse Joan for the very first time (in case she happens to read this–she recently told me to get her a copy of my dissertation which is a quarter-century old because now she wants to see what I was up to back then) what happened with the cherry tomatoes. We were gone a lot when they started to get a little wrinkled. But I didn’t throw them out because I knew as soon as we had a chance to be home a while I’d make pasta and they would go great in that.

The first I realized someone else had a different vision was when I found the tomatoes in the trash! Not even the compost, which is where they’d usually go, but in the trash. I knew what this meant: These tomatoes are utterly beyond redemption. So I sighed, patiently and compassionately, having navigated many decades of thought patterns not always as convincing to me as my own, and delicately pulled the least wrinkled ones out of the trash, put them back into the container, then put the container in the mudroom up above my head where I doubted she would be looking for tomatoes to throw out.

The next night we had pasta. While her back was turned I washed and cut up the tomatoes nicely with a sharp paring knife. I threw a few that might be even-post-wrinkled into the compost, then had a delicious delicious meal while dear Joan experienced a sadly under-tomatoed version. (When I let her preview this she said, “I should have done what I usually do, put it way under the other trash so you don’t find it.”)

What else is there to add? I’m not sure. Certainly I resonate with the gazillions who have testified to what happens when you’re convincingly exposed to the reality that your life will some day end.

I say convincingly, because it takes a lot to move us from pity for those who somehow didn’t outwit death to really really believe that we’re not exempt. This barely days-long horizon is why despite the data underscoring that spring is coming earlier and earlier as most of the planet keeps warming and warming, I sure had trouble still believing that when those polar winds blasted so fiercely I could literally feel them blowing in around my head on the pillow.

Still, sometimes what happens is sobering enough, inescapable enough, that against your own lifetime of believing otherwise you do become convinced that even you yourself have an expiration date. Then each remaining day does seem to be somehow fuller of fizz.

This might be something for the billionaires who are convinced they’ll live to 150 to think about before someday they learn that the biblical three-score-years-and-10 lifespan could affect even them.  Now what about the lives they could have lived with such different gifts of grace than the mere conviction of never having to give up their lives to find them?

I also do want to take seriously that the cherry tomatoes that had mold did require a dignified and loving good-bye. But also that the tomatoes that were just wrinkled really did still have a lot of zest and sheer joy to offer.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo

 

Anabaptist history, Anabaptist-Mennonite, Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Anabaptist-Mennonite writing, Mennonite, Mennonite church, Teachings of Jesus, Theodicy, violence of God, Writing

How Charles de Gaulle Shaped My Theological Odyssey, by J. Denny Weaver

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Guest post photo of author J. Denny WeaverWhen President Joe Biden traveled to France for the D-Day commemoration in June 2024, he and French President Emmanuel Macron emphasized the closeness of their relationship and the alliance between their two countries,. That closeness was most certainly not present in the 1960s, when French President Charles de Gaulle, who in my mind towers over his era in a way no politician does today, changed the course of my professional career.

It might be hard to imagine, but the story of Charles de Gaulle’s impact (and even potential implications or lessons for today’s national and global political dynamics) begins with my first stint in seminary. For the first time, I learned that the Old Testament had a plot. I was fascinated by the study of the prophets, whose writings I learned were commentary on the kings of Israel and the need for the people of Israel to seek justice. I immersed myself in the Hebrew language, with its unusual letters and reading right to left, and I became quite good at it. It was the onset of my career goal of becoming a religion professor in college or seminary. After this seminary work, I decided to pursue Old Testament as my particular focus.

The war in Vietnam was heating up. After two years of seminary, I volunteered for a term of alternative service with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). MCC sent my wife Mary and me to Brussels, Belgium, for a year of French study, and then to Algeria, where I was an English teacher in an Algerian lycée (high school). After this interlude, I intended to finish seminary and then pursue graduate study in Old Testament.

During the years 1966-68 that we lived in Algeria, I listened to both French and Algerian news on the radio and read French and Algerian newspapers. At the news shop in town I could buy Le Monde, the influential and internationally-known French paper. In 1968, French president Charles de Gaulle was much in the news. As I recall, notable actions and policies of le grand Charles, as the 6-foot 5-inch de Gaulle was nicknamed, included the following: vetoing British entry into the Common Market, refusing to sign a nuclear test ban treaty, expelling NATO headquarters from Paris, boycotting Israel after the Six-Day War, attacking the U.S. dollar as the standard for international currency, instituting university reforms that had students rioting in the streets of Paris for a month.

He also put wind in the sails of Quebec separatism when he traveled to Canada and bypassed the capital in Ottawa. Heading directly to Quebec, de Gaulle gave a speech that concluded with the words, “Vive le Québec libre! Vive le Québec libre!” (Live free Quebec!). Such actions perplexed and angered both French and American peoples.

I certainly did not understand what de Gaulle was about. When I asked my French colleagues at school what de Gaulle was doing, the majority said, “C’est vieux est fou“ (that old man is crazy), as they referred to the seventy-eight-year-old president. Le Monde even had an editorial with the headline “Est-il fou?” (Is he crazy?)

When I asked Jacques, my best French friend, what was going on with Charles de Gaulle, he had a different answer. It usually began “You have to understand,” followed by a longish policy or history lesson.

One day, probably weary of my questions, Jacques gave me a set of books and explained that everything I needed to know was in those three volumes. These books, profusely illustrated, gilt-edged, bound in embossed leather, were a limited edition of de Gaulle’s war memoirs, his Mémoires de Guerre. Jacques’s father was a Gaulist member of the French parliament. De Gaulle had prepared 600 copies of this special edition as gifts for his members in parliament. Jacques had his father’s copy to loan to me.

De Gaulle’s tomes proved fascinating reading. Written two decades earlier, the memoir read like a suspense novel. I spent several spellbound weeks reading about the experiences of le grand Charles in two world wars, as he led the forces of truth and justice, namely the French, against an array of opponents.

The account was enlightening. Jacques was correct—what I needed to know was in these volumes. I learned that de Gaulle believed that in World War II, the United States and Britain had failed to accord him the role and the respect that he thought he and France deserved. Thus he simply did not trust them.

As I read his story, it became clear to me that his policies in 1968 were all designed to counter British and United States influence and to raise the profile of France at their expense. We might even say that he was getting even with Britain and the United States for their earlier attitudes. Rather than being the chaotic policies of a crazy old man, as most of my French colleagues said, the policies of 1968 reflected a coherent strategy, shaped by de Gaulle’s experiences more than two decades earlier. One certainly did not have to agree with his actions, but the story brought clarity to them and would give insight to those who sought to counter the policies.

From this reading in de Gaulle’s war memoirs, what I realized for the first time was how significantly historical understanding can clarify issues in the present. In this particular case, an account decades before explained the 1960s tumultuous context in France. After seeing how a bit of history clarified events in France, this insight about the potential impact of historical understanding convinced me to change my graduate school focus from Old Testament to church history.

And that redirected my entire career. Without Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs, I would have had a much different career. De Gaulle launched me on a new path. Eventually this led to my developing a new approach to atonement theology that garnered international attention. The path to that atonement image was neither smooth nor direct. Learning came from a variety of sources, sometimes with embarrassment. For the entirety of that story, see my memoir, New Moves: A Theological Odyssey

In that book, the historical context insights I learned from de Gaulle help me understand how multiple views of the atonement came to be. I tell of how my own personal and especially theological history shaped me to move, ultimately, beyond understandings I came to believe supported violence rather than the ways of peace Jesus taught and invites us to live out even amid today’s many violences.

J. Denny Weaver, Madison, Wisconsin, is Professor Emeritus of Religion who taught for over 30 years in the Religion Department of Bluffton University. Well known as the developer of a nonviolent approach to atonement theology, he is author and editor of many books, including The Nonviolent Atonement, Becoming Anabaptist, Defenseless Christianity (with Gerald J. Mast), Living the Anabaptist Story (with Lisa Weaver, and his memoir, New Moves: A Theological Odyssey. As senior editor of the C. Henry Smith series, he oversaw 13 volumes.

Awe and wonder, inspiration, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Ode to Seaweed Footprints on Cape Cod and Other Poems by Clarissa Jakobsons

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Poet Clarissa Jakobsons

Seaweed Footprints on Cape Cod

When the moon’s shadow covers clouds
sunset eyes swell in sheep-sheared vastness
and the black spotted pelican skims lullabies
each evening. At the pier
fishermen lure with bait, prey, and songs
as the great heron inches closer to the fish
stacked pails. Several youngsters dance
splash into a blazing sunset,
clapping to the finality of light. Burnt rays
spread pink-orange lashes. Calmness breaks.
The Shoreway Patrol spews brazen crimson-yellow
lights on beach sand.
Flickering seaweed prints flow into halos,
fishermen twirl airborne fish, shadows ripple.
A heron gulps one whole. I summersault
into waves for the longest night.

Dana’s Kitchen, Falmouth MA

Night fills dreams with new words
for aged poems like sage and thyme

from Dana’s garden. We sit among
blooming daylilies, ocean spray

roses, and rainbow hydrangeas.
Breakfast: soft-shell bedded crabs,

cranberry muffins, and java
wakening each cell of our bodies.

Thunderstorm warnings loom, winds swirl
at 20 knots. Black back seagulls drift

between scattered showers, in and out of shore
lifting prayers with the fog. Underfoot

sharp, broken clam shells guide our paths.
The Esterel yacht anchors each year

in Falmouth while the Corwith Cramer
schooner heads towards Shoals Marine

Lab on Appledore Island, with my daughters.
Marielle and Lara. Hurricane Lana looms.

Ode to the Pacific Cypress Tree

Before leaving Gualala’s Sea Ranch
I run to the cypress tree facing
our living windows for final good-bye
hugs. Together, full arms waver
in the blustery winds. Four more arms
are needed to encircle and embrace
this ancient trunk. Each morning,
a chirping flock of birds
arrives fetching tender gifts of fallen seeds.
Seaside residents with inquisitive dogs
walk along ten-mile cliffs. Invisible cats are safe.
Good-byes open gifts. My family waits
without complaints in their rental car.
Mama cypress will wait, family roots
surround her with shade. Pacific waves
rest patiently waiting for our return.

—Clarissa Jakobson is a book artist, painter, and poet whose visual and written art are inspired by her Lithuanian heritage and her family’s history during WWII. Her new book, Baltic Amber in a Chest (Bottom Dog Press, Harmony Series, 2023), received a Pushcart Nomination. The book’s cover is her own oil painting. She reflects these influences pairing her visual and lyric art. Clarissa studied Art (BFA) and Poetry at Kent State University. Her work has been exhibited at the Morgan Conservatory, the Cleveland Museum of Art and enjoyed a solo exhibition at the Moose Gallery. Clarissa won First Place in the Akron Art Institute New Words Competion and her poems are published internationally. She lives in Aurora, Ohio, and enjoys daily walks with her husband around Sunny Lake.

beauty in blemishes, grace, inspiration

The Tulips that Became Roses

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Roses photo in blog post "The Tulips That Became Roses"As a mostly failed provider of flowers for my patient spouse Joan, I was impressed with myself one Mother’s Day when I happened to be in the grocery store and saw a display of flowers. For some reason this particular bunch of lovely red roses was cheaper than another bunch which I figured was just a different variety. But the cheaper ones looked great, what was not to like, why not be a good steward of precious resources? Or as some might less charitably put it, a cheapskate?

So I proudly took home the bouquet of a dozen roses and offered them up. Joan was indeed touched that I had thought to provide them but with slightly furrowed brow also offered something along the lines of “I would never have thought of that–tulips for Mother’s Day. But they’re beautiful!”

I was taken aback. How could these lovely red flowers be other than roses? But Joan patiently and compassionately explained that tulips is what they were. This was why they were cheaper than the other red flowers which were actually roses.

I told the story in church that morning as part of launching a sermon. Congregants who owned a garden center risked falling off their chairs at this revelation of just how lacking in common sense and basic knowledge their pastor was.

But then came the following Sunday. They had brought a lovely little potted plant to the sanctuary. They explained that this was a rose bush from their nursery. They were giving it to me. If I planted it and managed to keep it alive it would teach me what roses look like.

Amid the general hilarity I was actually quite taken with their gift. I carefully planted it and for some years was tickled when a few roses would appear to remind me how to tell a rose from a tulip. But the plant always struggled and once was so hard to see I mowed over part of it.

Eventually it was gone from where I’d planted it. I forgot it.  Then yesterday Joan and I went for a walk. She pointed out this tall bush with multiple red flowers on it. “Do you remember what those are?” Indeed! “Yes, those are not tulips; they’re roses.”

“Did you remember,” she asked, “that when it just kept struggling and struggling I transplanted it to that flower garden in case it did better there?” If I’d ever known this, I’d lost track of it.

What a memento, these decades later. A memento of life as a mixture of stumbles and mistakes, of good intentions and failed implementations, from the tangles of which–nurtured with patience, generosity, grace, and nudges of encouragement–red-rose beauty can spring.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo

grace, inspiration, loving viewpoint enemies

Proud to be an Okie

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Blog post from Kingsview & CoActually no, I’m not from Muskogee, Oklahoma, where “We don’t smoke marijuana” and “where even squares can have a ball,” as country singer Merle Haggard celebrated. Still I’m almost proud to be from there as I ponder the history of the version Merle first sang, what he came to make of it, and what became of it over the years since he first wrote the lyrics (with Roy Edward Burris) during the Vietnam War.

It’s complicated. Just before the pandemic hit and he mostly stopped live touring, for the first time I heard Kris Kristofferson, surely closer to the hippie Merle mocks in the song than to a square, in live concert. (There is a 1975 version on YouTube of Kris singing “Okie” with Cher and Rita Coolidge that seems to suggest some ironic awareness; the younger Kris throws around his mop of wild hair as he intones the lyrics about not letting “hair grow long and shaggy.”) That pre-pandemic night Kris, himself oddly enough a former soldier, sang  of the hippie-like values and addictions Merle chastised accompanied by “The Strangers,” the very band Merle founded and toured with until his 2016 death.

Memories of that night came flooding back when CBS released a special featuring Willie Nelson’s 2023 ninetieth-birthday concert. Woven through it are several appearances by a frail Kristofferson, supported tenderly by such singers as Roseanne Cash and Nora Jones. These made me grateful I’d experienced Kris live when I did and reminded me again of the “Okie” complexities.

Because they also live in me, riven by paradoxes in my roots and life trajectories, the contradictions inherent in hearing Kris sing Merle’s famous “Okie from Muscogee” did fill me with a certain rapture. The contradictions throb in me, for example,  as I remain committed to pacifism yet will never forget how moved I was by the stories of U.S. veterans I met while dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

By the end of his life it seemed clear Merle, once a prisoner pardoned for burglaries by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, was singing the song within layers of complexity I could never claim fully to plumb yet which intrigued. The Okie (which he only kind of became after his family migrated from California during the Great Depression) who sounded like he was bashing anyone who smoked marijuana had battled addictions himself.

Anyone who hasn’t heard Merle sing “Amazing Grace” at St. Quentin, where he had been imprisoned, hasn’t fully experienced grace. This version is ragged, rough, and raw–throbbing with awareness of how “wretches” (an “Amazing Grace” lyric I rejected when younger, before I grew old enough to recognize myself in it) are saved.

So this is who sings about being from Muscogee. And in his singing so many layers of meaning, he reminds what richness imperfect people can offer if true to their truths rather than addicted to offering fake truths.

I and we needn’t agree with Merle on every detail to grasp that here is a real human being, someone who has traveled through vicissitudes with integrity, acknowledging and even magnifying them when called for. Here is no flattening of meaning but ever deeper exploration of it.

And so as Merle ages his songs become ever richer, their subtexts ever more resistant to simple interpretations, such that it made sense at Kris’s concert for his audience to break into applause as  “Okie from Muscogee” launched.

We were sitting, that night, in a country in which some loved “only squares can have a ball” and others loved the possibility that Merle’s song is at least partly the satire Kris may think it to be. Yet the song transcends the divisions.

The hatreds and animosities that spawned it in the 1960s as war raged have perhaps not so much healed as mutated and maybe even intensified. Interpretations and responses to “Okie” have mutated as well. Some see it as one more inspiration for continuing the cultural battles. But as I ponder Kris singing Merle’s song as his own life fades and with the band Merle’s death left behind, I find myself living at least briefly in a world in which only squares can have a ball yet with the hippies sing toward that grace still able to amaze.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo

Extending DreamSeeker Magazine through posts from Michael A. King and guests