Dispatch #27
Sunday, September 29
West Des Moines, Iowa

Susan Greeley returns to the tour today, flying in from Chicago.

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I estimate that we've met with more than 2000 people face to face--the greatest number of these in rallies, but a significant percentage also in small groups over and over again. I hope to have met more than 3000 before this is done, 3500 if possible.

Though we advertise each rally's beginning to occur at 6:45 with gathering music, people start to arrive ever at 6 pm! Many have driven great distances, but even the local folk tend to be early in these parts--come lookin' for the perfect seat as the younger sunburnt surfer goes lookin' for the perfect wave. I talk with those who have nearly an hour to wait. I learn their names and shake their hands. I say something about my own old age (58) and their shoulders start to heave. "Young, honey?" I guess not. But then, their laughter (1) makes genuine old age less threatening, and (2) assures me still of several years' sturdiness left in these bones. So at our next rally tomorrow night I'll shake an ancient hand and mention something about my own old age ... again.

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Apples are ripe on our small farm. Ah, my spirit yearns homeward, to make sauce and apple butter and cider and apple jelly. Every year since we moved to that little land, I've planted a large vegetable garden, harvested black raspberries, strawberries, red raspberries, black walnuts, grand varieties of vegetables; I have put up tomato juice, tomato sauces, stewed tomatoes, green tomato relish, pickles sweet and vinegar-ed, squashes, pumpkin, beans, corn, beets....

It makes me homesick now and restless, not preparing for the winter.

And with all my heart I want to believe the white hairs who laugh at my calling 58 years "old." For I am torn. It is by a specific call of God that I am out here. The calls of God don't ask or expect us necessarily to like the task set before us. The calls expect only that we trust and are thereby made capable and do thereby accomplish the task. I am out here because I have been sent. And again and again in my life I have done things (ministries, preachings, speakings, travelings) not at my pleasure but at my Lord's--while always yearning the narrower, quieter, more solitary life on a few acres at home, planting, harvesting, writing my books. In the late 80's Thanne and I had begun to plan a move to a small farm somewhere in Wisconsin whereon to live that singular life. BUT: Lutheran Vespers intervened, speaking engagements for Churchwide gatherings intervened, various teachings and external obligations intervened--all of which is to say: God intervened, and one cannot say no to such supernal interventions (witness Isaiah, witness Jeremiah and Moses and Gideon and Mary the Mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene).

So if 58 is young enough to anticipate a rounding for more settled years in the future, I relax. I accomplish my calls. I pray 20 arrows yet in my quiver and a handful of significant books.

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot drawing near And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.

So says Andrew Marvell to his coy mistress, which was not, in this his poem, the Writing Life but rather the sensuous life--and fears of a fully spiritual eternity made that young man anticipate eternities as "deserts." I know better.

And yet I confess: I'd like to live as that old Roman who left the City and the Senate, and retired to his country lands and his horticultural pursuits, moving in rhythm with the seasons and all natural changes until he died and was laid in the earth. I would stand under the Creator's sky and live in faithful obedience to the Creator's creation. There is a certain freedom as well as an annual satisfaction in farming. Obeying the fiercer, more specified call has rewards which may never be known. What do I know of all the consequences of my preaching on Lutheran Vespers these last 8 years? But obeying the mind of God in the weather and the earth produces the food of my table.

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And there is in one's writing the lingering spirit as well as the forms of faith--no, the molds that themselves form the faith--called story.

Can't this be its own vocation? Can't this fulfill the desires of a calling God? (No, I don't want to be dispeptic Amos--except insofar as that sycamore stick was free after two years to quit.)

Listen to Milton at the beginning of PARADISE LOST:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse .... ...or, if Sion hill Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the Oracle of God, I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast abyss, And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine; what is low, raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.

"O Spirit ... Instruct me."

Milton was about to tell the story of Creation and of the Fall of humankind. In preparation, he invoked the invasions of the Holy Spirit. For he considered this the work of God. He never doubted that writing the Truth was of God and for God.

So I take Milton's precedent as my own: I will, I can, I should write for the glory of God.

While farming a little.

When God shall see fit to release me.

Unto this devout pleasures.

In the end.

Walt