From the rear-view mirror, the weekend feels like it must have been one of those three-day operations, enhanced either by a holiday or a vacation day. But it was only Regular Size. Two different and dissimilar events in two different places conspire to leave the impression. Not to mention all the driving. But it was great driving—high quality, expensive driving on gas worth more than three bucks a gallon. How’s that for luxurious living?

I’d packed my Viking apparatus into Mrs. Hermanson the night before, and so was able to start south immediately after work. The road was Highway 169, a Minnesota favorite once you get past the congestion around Shakopee. 169 winds through a beautiful wooded valley in the St. Peter and Mankato areas It’s one of my favorite drives in the state. With Sissel on the stereo it doesn’t get much better (at least in my emotionally impoverished life). I was saddened, however, to see that one of my favorite Dairy Queens in the world, the one out in the country north of Mankato, has closed down after all these years. The last time I stopped they’d expanded their facility. Perhaps they overreached. A lesson to us all.

The road got narrower and less picturesque as Iowa approached, but I carried on. The people of the Bode (pronounced “Boad”), Iowa “Uff Da Days” festival put the cowardly Vikings (those who, like me, did not care to camp in tents) up in a motel in Humboldt, about twenty minutes away. I went there and slept well.

The day dawned gray, wet and stormy, but the forecast on the Weather Channel said it should clear, and it did that. The day went well, a welcome contrast to the heat and poor attendance in Decorah a week before. Bode is a very small town (about 350 residents), but we actually had more visitors to our encampment in one day there than we had in two days in Decorah.

We did four Live Steel Combat performances. I link to this page from a Viking discussion board where Eric posted some photos. I make the link, not because it’s terribly illuminating, but because I think I look fairly studly in the pictures, for an aging fat guy. I came home with a bruise on my left shoulder, and another on my ribcage. Also abrasions on both shins and the underside of my right forearm. I bear them proudly. They are wounds of honor. Eric is catching up to me, beating me more often than I beat him. He’s learning my tricks. However, I did fight Ragnar to a draw (we “killed” each other) once, so maybe I’m learning too.

It’s tough in small towns these days. They seem to be on the wrong side of history, and they know it. Economics and government subsidies favor big farms, so that instead of a hundred small farms, each feeding a family, you’ve got one big farm with a single family and a few employees, often transients. The towns have lost their economic base. Jonah Goldberg wrote about farm subsidies recently in National Review, and what he said was all true. But it doesn’t change the fact that a small, rural American town may have been the best environment for raising kids in the history of the world. And we’re losing it as we watch.

We tore down the camp Saturday evening, and after another pleasant motel night I set out for Belmond, Iowa and the Severson Family Reunion. I remembered that my church body has a congregation in Goldfield, Iowa, through which I passed, so I hunted it down and attended there. It’s a very small church at the best of times, and this was summer, so there were only about ten of us. The pastor is a Licensed Lay Pastor who drives up from Des Moines. Without the expense of a full-time minister, they manage to get by.

I enjoyed the service. It was neither emotional nor elegant, but it was familiar to me—more like the services I grew up with than what we have at the church I attend today. I don’t know how long it’s been since I heard a pastor give thanks for the crops. I felt I was among my own people (I know it’s wrong and evil for anyone with white skin to say that, but that was how I felt). And the sermon spoke to me.

Then on to Belmond. The reunion met in a nursing home’s dining room. Attendance was poor this year. People blamed gas prices. But the potluck was sumptuous. I met a distant relative (a lady of course) who was 91 years old. We can do better than that at the Walker reunions, but then we have higher attendance and a larger pool. I told them the story of my search for Cousin Trygve’s ancestor. I won a door prize (nearly everyone did). Everyone seemed pleased to meet me. They don’t get many people from my branch of the family at these do’s.

Then Bob, the organizer I met in Decorah, offered to take me to Kanawha, Iowa (the epicenter of Severson history in this country) to look for Trygve’s ancestor’s grave. I followed him the ten miles there, and out to the tree-bordered cemetery. It’s not a large cemetery, but I despaired of finding a single grave, without a map.

But Bob knew the place well. We started going around to places (mostly at the west end) where family was buried, on the theory that relatives tend to group together. He showed me various graves—one the son of the man I was looking for. I looked over and said, “There’s a stone that says Swelland.” (Swelland was my dad’s maternal grandmother’s married name, and she was a Severson). I went and looked at it and found a large family stone in a plot that otherwise contained only a single grave—that of Dad’s uncle Theodore, who died in a threshing engine explosion in 1918. The Swellands had a penchant for leaving underpopulated grave plots behind. They left one in my home town, Kenyon, Minnesota, too, with only my great-grandmother in it. My family took it over, and my grandparents and two aunts and an uncle are buried there. It belongs to me now, and I hope to lie there in time (but not too soon). Martha Severson Swelland’s been alone on her side of the stone a long time.

As I was photographing Theodore’s grave, Bob said, “Here’s the one you’re looking for.” I walked a few feet over to where he stood, and there was the gravestone Cousin Trygve wanted. I took several pictures for him.

I drove away triumphant.

Only afterward did I think that it might be sad for Trygve, in a way. He’d wanted to learn his ancestor’s story, but it may be he’d hoped to learn some good reason why the old man had cut off all communication with his unacknowledged offspring in Norway. If he’d died young and poor, for instance, that would be an excuse.

But he lived to be 90 and did all right for himself. One understands that after years of marriage it would be awkward to say to one’s wife, “Uh, there’s some unfinished business in Norway I need to take care of.” But for all that, the abandonment was a wrong act. This man was remembered as a Christian, a church sacristan, a man so kindly that his wife had to discipline the children. Yet at the back of his mind the old sin must have remained. Did he plan to “do something about it someday,” and did the right time just never come? Or did he try to bury the past? We can’t know, and mustn’t judge.

But it’s too bad.

I had an intriguing e-mail yesterday–the kind that appeals strongly to my essential exhibitionism.

It came from a well-known female reporter from a major newspaper (both of whose names are safe with me). She was responding to a comment I left on a Christian website, concerning my experience with a well-known online matchmaking service (whose identity I shall also clutch protectively to my chest). The matchmaker had declined to allow me to sign up. The reporter is doing a story on people whose experiences with online dating services have been less than optimal, and she thought my story might be helpful.

I think I disappointed her. I was willing (no, let’s be honest–eager) to be interviewed, but I had to admit that the service hadn’t done anything out of line in my case. They advertise proudly that they reject people who are bad marriage prospects, and it’s not hard to see that, by most objective standards, I’m one of that select group. She hasn’t responded to my response.

So there it is. I finally get an interview offer from a major newspaper, and it’s not about my books. It’s about my remarkable inadequacy as a potential date.

Fame is where you get it.

Or where you don’t.

(I’ll be gone till Monday. Playing Viking and going to a family reunion in Iowa. I’ll see you if I survive the rigors thereof.)

Everybody’s talking about Mel Gibson, so I’ll say something too.

I think there’s much to agree with in this post on the Libertas site. Gibson’s credentials as a conservative are actually kind of mushy. We’ve loved him, first of all because of Braveheart, one of the few recent movies that men who aspire to heroism can really embrace. Then came The Passion of the Christ, which we almost had to defend just because of the nature of the attacks on it (a not-very-defensible tactic).

I liked, but didn’t love, The Passion. It was a far more Catholic movie than most Protestants realized, which doesn’t necessarily make it bad. I don’t object to Catholics making Catholic movies. In the realm of literature, I’ve learned to enjoy several Catholic novelists very much—far more than a lot of Protestant authors, many of whom are too liberal or insufficiently skilled to please me.

In contrast to many of Gibson’s defenders, even Jewish ones, I thought I saw a hint of anti-Semitism in The Passion. I thought the priests in the movie were portrayed as Jewish caricatures. I never mentioned it at the time, because the whole subject is so thorny (which makes me a coward). I don’t agree with the current orthodoxy that says that the Jewish leaders had nothing at all to do with the crucifixion. The gospels clearly state that they did. The priests wanted to be rid of Jesus, and they manipulated Pontius Pilate, through threats of unrest, to have Him put to death.

But they did it for a reason, as the Gospel of John (11:48) makes clear. They considered Jesus a political threat, not just to themselves but to the commonwealth. They feared an uprising and Roman reprisals. Gibson could have emphasized this aspect and made his priests more sympathetic, without selling out to the “blame the Romans” revisionists.

If Gibson’s career is over, it frankly serves him right. But if Braveheart and (even) The Passion get tarnished because of him, our loss will be great.

I heard from the man with the genealogy information last night, and he seems to know pretty much everything Cousin Trygve wants to find out. I got the highlights to pass on to him, and I’ll get documents with details when I go down to Decorah this weekend.

Another crisis met and mastered, less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels.

I was back at work today, inventorying books. I found a commentary on Revelation called something like The Letters of Jesus Christ to the Churches. The title hit me funny, and I realized I’d always had a misconception about the New Testament. I’d thought that Jesus left no personal writings behind, but for those of us who believe in the full inspiration of Scripture, the first three chapters of Revelation clearly constitute seven epistles to churches, dictated by the Lord Himself.

Then a second thing occurred to me. If 20th Century American Christians were to imagine an epistle from Jesus, it wouldn’t be like the real ones at all.

Here’s the sort of thing we’d write:

My dear children,

How are you? I just wanted to write and tell you how much I love you. I derive such pleasure from watching you living and growing, enjoying your lives and your families.

I’m not happy about some of the things you do, but I want you to know that no matter how often you fall, I’ll always be right there to lift you onto your feet again. I have such wonderful plans for you—if you could just see what they are, you’d be amazed…

You get the idea.

Now look at what He actually writes. He compliments the churches a little (if He can), and tells them very clearly what they’re doing wrong. He warns them in no uncertain terms that if they don’t straighten up and fly right there will be serious, eternal consequences. The only warm fuzzies he has to offer are to churches under severe persecution, and the best He can promise them is a reward if they hold out to the end (that is, until their enemies kill them).

Compare and contrast.

Later, I picked up a book called The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology, by Charles P. Krauth, D.D., published in 1871 by the United Lutheran Church Publishing House in Philadelphia. The first line of the Preface caught my eye:

That some form of Christianity is to be the religion of the world, is not only an assured fact to the believer in Revelation, but must be regarded as probable, even in the judgment which is formed on purely natural evidence.

That was how it looked in 1871, folks. Everybody, even skeptics, were pretty sure that Christianity was so obviously superior to all other religions that it must inevitably be universally adopted in time. This idea went hand in hand with the certainty that Western Culture, in its obvious superiority, was destined to be taken up by every nation and tribe, as each was educated and gained enlightenment.

It’s a depressing thought, considered in light of how the world has changed since then.

But I prefer to think of it in a more positive way. It’s a reminder that things that look inevitable in one age often turn out to be very evitable indeed. Global warming, Islamicization, ever-increasing government power, homosexual marriage… any and all of them may fizzle and end up as a bad joke.

We’re not as wise as we think, and that’s often a good thing.