Stranger in a Strange Land

This issue of BOOKS & CULTURE is dedicated to the memory of LIONEL BASNEY • 1946-1999 •

Immanuel’s Ground

I met Lionel Basney in the spring of 1996 at Calvin College’s Faith & Writing Festival, where we discovered that we shared a passion for poetry and classical music. That, and our faith—my pietism didn’t embarrass Lionel—was just about all we had in common, but it was more than enough to build a friendship on. His first essay for B&C, “Questioning ‘Progress’: The Resurrection of Ned Ludd,” appeared in the September/October 1998 issue. A piece on Wendell Berry and an essay on the fate of classical music are forthcoming.

Lionel’s letters always began with a notation of the weather: “clear day growing (2:00 p.m.) cloudy,” he typed at the top of a letter in April. When I called him at home to talk about a piece he was working on, he invariably had to be fetched from somewhere outdoors.

“Lionel,” as his Calvin English department colleagues John Netland and Susan Felch recall, “was a man of many gifts, central among which was the gift of living life deliberately, choosing his words and his actions with care. He was committed to God’s creation, to the natural rhythms of life—and so he chose to live in a rural community, to tend his own garden, to patronize small, family shops, to use—or refuse to use—technology judiciously.”

Yes, and when he fixed you with his level gaze and spoke in that rich, beautifully modulated voice, you might begin to brush invisible crumbs from your sweater. Just by being himself, he could make you feel suddenly careless, heedless. Not a humorless man—the opposite, in fact—but serious, in a way that goes against the grain of our time.

A week or two after we met, I received in the mail an offprint of his wonderful long poem, “The Snow Plough Man” (first published in the Winter 1995 issue of the journal Christianity and Literature). “There was an accident,” it began.

There was an accident this summer, when Lionel was on a family vacation in North Carolina. On August 16 he was swimming in the ocean; a freakish succession of large waves rolled over him and held him under. He was taken to the hospital, where he remained in a coma until he died on the evening of August 21. He leaves behind his wife, Ruth, and their daughters, Claire, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, and Lauren, a violin student at the Juilliard School of Music.

In the memorial service, Netland and Felch quoted from a series of Lenten meditations by Lionel, published earlier this year in The Banner:

“We move in small, repetitive, cumulative patterns—learning to make a habit of what we do well, and repenting, again and again, what we do badly” (Feb. 21). What Lionel did well, what he made a habit of doing, was to live deliberately and generously and to invite us, through his elegant and precise language, to do the same, living in anticipation of the Shalom for which we long. At the conclusion of his meditations, Lionel wrote, “When I hear the morning train I imagine that it is calling for the town that used to be there. So we live as believers, thinking of the place we started from, Eden, the home we can’t get back to. … So we dream of the place we are traveling toward, Bunyan’s Celestial City, the new Jerusalem . …There will be a day when the train will call, and it will be answered with a shout of welcome from the community of God’s love, whole again, restored.”

Later this summer, an essay by Lionel, “Immanuel’s Ground,” appeared in The American Scholar (Summer 1999). In it he revisited in memory the camp meetings in rural New York State that he attended 40 years ago and more. “We stood, sang, knelt, prayed in the tabernacle on late July nights and waited there together,” he recalls in the essay’s conclusion:

In their prayer caps and wide, garish ties, these people had made a cultural triumph by paying attention first of all to other things. They had built according to an ideal of plainness—light, dark, the wooden roof, the grove. What the plainness meant was: the intention to be plain, with yourself and others; directness of purpose; the long establishment of languages in which spiritual things could be spoken of directly, plainly, in which spiritual business could be done. I would go back and sit there again, if I could—if the tabernacle had not been torn down and the people gone elsewhere—and absorb the preacher’s words, the songs, watch the night and the rain wait on the threshold, smell the dense unflowered sweetness of the northern woods. I know that place for what it was: Immanuel’s ground.

To which I can only add: Amen.