The Professor's Death Song - Christianity Today

Psalm 121

The Lord Is Thy Keeper

1 I will lift up my eyes unto the hills.
From whence cometh my strength?

2 My help cometh from the Lord,
which made heaven and earth.

3 He will not suffer thy foot to be moved:
he that keepeth thee will not slumber.

4 Behold, he that keepeth Israel
shall neither slumber nor sleep.

5 The Lord is thy keeper:
the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.

6 The sun shall not smite thee by day,
nor the moon by night.

7 The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil:
he shall preserve thy soul.

8 The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in
from this time forth, and even for evermore.

A little over a year ago, a one-time colleague of mine died, although I can’t say I knew him well. He was older than I am, much older, and his tenure at the college where I teach had ended many years earlier. The psalm he wanted read at his funeral was 121; had he been Lakota and not Dutch American, we might say he chose Psalm 121 as his death song.

The preacher was retired, a fill-in, he told us. Chicago born-and-reared, he spoke in a clipped, Windy City-slicker accent that seemed the wrong pitch for a vastly empty sanctuary out on the Plains. The church’s real pastor was in Hawaii, where the rest of us should have been, the temperature outside somewhere close to 20 below.

Because there was nowhere else to look, I felt like this pastor’s wife: I wanted to run up to the front, lick my fingers, and plaster down a rooster tail that, all funeral long, had him resembling Alfalfa from the old gray-tone movie vignettes. He seemed somehow wrong for the job, but then so much was. By his own admission, the preacher had only known the deceased for five years. I couldn’t help wondering how much he didn’t know.

What was most remarkable was what wasn’t said, what couldn’t be, or shouldn’t. A funeral simply wasn’t the time to flesh out the story printed on the memorial program. (In this man’s life the devil was, without a doubt, in the details.) I suppose even in my telling there are things that still cannot be spoken in that church, no matter that the funeral is long past.

But then, had the preacher mentioned that the old man had suffered immensely during his lifetime, none of the few who gathered would have been surprised; most, I’m sure, knew the story. His back-breaking burdens didn’t need to be recounted to friends and certainly not to family. Still, that none of that difficult life was even mentioned seemed, to me at least, somehow remarkable, turning the event into something of a parody of itself.

That parody had begun with the notice of the professor’s death a week before, an email note from the college president, who typed “passing of pioneer” in the subject line. His note began with the news, but went on to say this:

As this first generation of faculty pass away, may we remember with gratitude to God their contributions and leadership in laying a foundation for the strength and vigor that Dordt College enjoys today as a quality Reformed Christian institution of higher education. Please join in giving thanks for the blessings of his life and pray as well for the peace of Christ to be experienced by his family at this time.

Nothing of what that news offered wasn’t true, but such scant note of the man’s incredible story made the cynic in me—the writer—shake my head at the near absurdity of remembering, simply, that the deceased was one of the institution’s pioneers.

Once upon a time I picked him up off the sidewalk, picked him up literally after he had fallen—I didn’t see how. It was clear he couldn’t get back on his feet by himself. His trusty black labrador sat at his side as he had been trained to do. The professor was a big man—6’4″ or 6’5″, well over 250 pounds—and there he was, nearing eighty years old, sitting in the grass just off the sidewalk across the street from our house. I had to introduce myself because he’d already gone blind by that time; but once he heard my voice, he knew who I was. I got him in our car and took him home, then called the secretary of the church to advise her that it might be prudent to send someone to his house—he lived alone, a widower—because he seemed quite unsettled after the fall. I thought I’d done what I could.

He knew me because occasionally, long ago, I used to visit him in the office of the bookstore he ran, a place out of the way of almost anyone, not to mention the bookstore which he, by administrative fiat, was designated to run. In truth, the store’s authority was a hard-working woman whose curse it was—as it sometimes still is for women in evangelical circles—to have to deal with less competent male superiors.

The president’s email notwithstanding, this professor was really not a professor. An old friend of mine once told me he’d had the professor as a high school teacher early in the 1950s, in a classroom where he’d been, according to this old friend, something of a joke as a teacher. But the professor had gone on to grad school, earned a doctorate in chemistry, then taken a job at a fledgling college on the edge of the Plains, where as a classroom teacher he still all too regularly stumbled over himself.

Back then, the college where I’ve stayed for all these years was a family, not so much the business it has become. In those days, the professor and his wife—the obituary called her “his high school sweetheart”—had a big family, some their own and some adopted, a United Nations of progeny his wife insisted upon once it became clear the professor wasn’t going to go into foreign missions. Rather than send the poor incompetent professor and his sprawling family packing, the powers-that-be gave him the bookstore job, something to support his wife and kids, yet another job at which—how can I say this?—he wasn’t accomplished.

Once upon a time on a visit to his office thirty years ago, I was admiring The Treasury of David, a three-volume, hardcover reprint set of Spurgeon’s commentaries on the Psalms. “Take ’em,” he said. I did. In a way, that’s the way he ran the bookstore. I still have that set. Throughout my life, I’ve used it extensively—the gift of those books was rich.

When he said I could, I pulled them out from the mess that was his office, thousands of books hither and yon; a prairie twister could have marched through that place and barely altered the shape of things. By the looks of his office, he was something of a hoarder. By the time he lost that job, it must have taken a skid loader to clear the detritus.

I used to visit him there. He was more than twenty years my senior and had never really been a colleague, but he was an immensely gentle soul, and that chaos of books made me feel at home. Those occasional visits were the only times I really talked much to him, not often at all.

In short, professionally, the pioneer professor’s life was a sad series of simple failures. He’d earned a doctorate in a field he left behind; he’d never prospered in the classroom; and then he ran a bookstore by staying out of the way of the woman without whose help nothing would have functioned at the checkout.

But he was a gentle man, blessed with a sweet disposition. For years, the only thing he ever said to me, in passing, was, “Beautiful day,” even though I knew, for him, it likely wasn’t or hadn’t been. That line was, it seemed to me, less of a mantra than a commitment. Sometimes, when I’d meet him on the sidewalk, I’d say it before he could, a little game he rather liked.

But I sat there at his funeral not long ago, telling myself that there was so much left out of his obituary, out of the funeral—so much that should have been said, but couldn’t.

Roughly a dozen years after the college’s founding in 1955, it suffered growth pangs that threatened its existence. A coalition of professors and constituents declared war on the professors at the heart of what they believed to be the institution’s creeping liberalism. It was the late ’60s, a time of foment everywhere; and the young turks defined righteousness in a broader way than the old guard, who believed piety was a matter of individual behavior plain and simple, the struggle of the Christian life growing primarily from the powers of darkness within. The enemy were those who carried a different and broader worldview, one they drew, in Dutch Reformed terms, from the work of Abraham Kuyper, who was not only a pious clergyman but also prime minister of the Netherlands, a man who championed a theology that might be summarized in the fashion of another Dutch theologian, Herman Bavinck, who maintained that the Christian life demanded two “conversions”—one to the Lord of Heaven and Earth, and a second, back to the world he created and loves. In the late ’60s, it was that second “conversion” that created havoc, suggesting to the old guard an all-too-snug relationship with the world.

In the Iowa teapot in which the institution existed, the conservatives did what they could to alert the constituency to the danger, including writing supporting churches across the continent and taking out full-page ads excoriating, even demonizing, the progressives, the liberals. The professor signed those full-page ads in the local newspaper, indicating he stood, foursquare, with the conservatives.

That was forty years ago, and only during the interim between his death and his funeral did I become aware that there was more—much more—to the story. A former colleague who was one of the targets of that distrust told me about the professor back then: “During my difficult years at DC,” he wrote, “one of the persons who supported me in surprising ways was [the professor],” whose name was prominent among the signatures beneath the jeremiad in the Sioux Center News.

“In order for him not to be booted out of the house,” the now-retired progressive and friend told me, “(i) I could not meet with him in his house, but would meet [him], even late in the evening, at the college; (ii) he asked me not to call him by telephone at home; (iii) if I had a message for his lonely and bright son, I would leave a message with [him] at the college and not talk with his wife.” What’s more, the professor once told him, “during a long visit with him in his office at DC and in the middle of the night, that [his wife] had forced him, in subtle and devious ways, to sign that long tirade.” His wife—”his high school sweetheart,” to quote the obit—was, with certainty, among those who believed the college was abandoning righteousness.

But there’s more to the story. The battle for institution and confessional identity ended when the president fired a few of the protesting conservatives, and other dissenters left. According to my friend—and former prof—the success of the conservatives “would have been detrimental for all those students at Dordt who were looking for renewal in their celebration of the freedom and power of biblical faith while living in a deeply troubled tradition, culture, and world.”

And then this: “those students included the professor’s own son, who went on to get a doctorate from Harvard—and today teaches in the Middle East.”

None of this was mentioned in the obituary that appeared in the local papers—or, of course, at the funeral. And what is a man’s life without his story?

But there are more chapters—chapters that bring us farther and farther away, or so it seems, from the series of promises in Psalm 121, the passage of Scripture the professor wanted as the text for his funeral sermon, the professor’s death song, a psalm that seemed, at least to me, such an unlikely choice, given the truth of what wasn’t said.

Late at night on June 14, 1993, an 18-year-old kid named Andrew Grant, along with an accomplice named Haggerty, entered his parents’ home in Cobb County, Georgia, with the intent to kill his entire family: Gary Wayne, 42, Kathryn, 41, and his two siblings, brother Nathan, who was 16, and sister Sarah, 14. Armed with a butcher knife, he killed his mother, his father, and his sister; he told Haggerty to kill his brother, but his accomplice couldn’t, and Nathan escaped.

Andrew, who had no prior criminal record, was the professor’s grandson; the parents he murdered were the professor’s son and daughter-in-law.

The trial began on September 25, 1995, and concluded on October 13, 1995, when the jury returned guilty verdicts on all three counts. Andrew was, that day, sentenced to death; and he is still on death row in Georgia and therefore was not present, in church, at the funeral of his grandpa, nor was his name included among the long list of children and grandchildren. His parents’ deaths, like that of his sister, were clearly listed, however—with no explanation.

That staggering story from the life of the pioneer professor wasn’t told and probably couldn’t be. But to me, not to say anything about it seemed sadly more proper than honest.

For two years in the early 1980s, my wife and I and our children moved to Wisconsin for graduate school. During that time, every six months or so, we received a letter from the professor’s wife, who would tell us what was happening at the college—a bland recitation of weather conditions, as well as a report of who was leaving the faculty or going on leave. Neither Barbara or I knew the professor’s wife at all, had never spoken to her; but I soon recognized the letters’ genre—it was the kind of note missionaries might receive out on the mission field, a report from home. Those letters were noble but strangely cold, like January in Iowa. They were a blessed obligation of a righteous woman who undoubtedly thought of us as being out, dangerously, in the world, somewhere on the mission field.

That the professor’s wife lived in a wholly different world than the rest of us was clear to many in the college family back then. She hadn’t always been that way, but later in her life she did things, said things, even wrote things that felt like the work of a fanatic. Because she never did anything to manifest her emotional problems in a public way, however, she continued to live in their century-old house. I don’t remember when she died, but I know some few whispered that life just might be easier for the professor with her gone.

Soon enough, he went blind, another story. That was when I saw him across the street, unable to get to his feet. Wherever he went, even in church, that lovely black lab would accompany him, sleeping unobtrusively through the sermons.

I’ve no desire to make the professor a victim of a shrewish wife—or hard-driving bookstore employees, spoiled college students, or even that criminal grandson on death row. We’re all, in some ways, architects of our own fates, or so it seems to me; and the professor himself is not without his own sin.

Several years ago, an unemployed family from Sioux Center, Iowa, moved to South Dakota, where an old friend wondered about them, given the fact that their son and others were spending all kinds of time and money to help this new family. They were needy, after all, but this Dakota friend wondered just who these people were.

I didn’t know the couple, but they had lived in our neighborhood, and I discovered, almost by accident, that the husband’s mug shot was on the state’s sexual predator website. When you clicked on Sioux Center, the man’s face appeared.

But another face appeared to me that day with a click of a mouse—the professor’s. There he was, an old man, disheveled, blind, and alone, the mug shot very much unbecoming. Men and women are not featured on that website without cause. Something had happened, something very dark. Something he’d done himself.

I don’t know that story, and I don’t know that I want to. Whatever happened, whatever he did, remains beyond the reaches of my imagination; honestly, I don’t understand how an old sweet professor could put himself into a situation awful enough to merit arrest and conviction. I don’t understand how this gentle giant could be guilty of that kind of crime, then listed, for all the world to see, as a sexual predator. But he was.

I checked again a couple of weeks after his funeral. He’s no longer there. His death removed him.

None of that was said at the funeral. None of that appeared in the obituary. None of it was spoken around the tables of sandwiches and Jell-O salad after the service, for those few who had gathered to remember the professor’s life or to give comfort to his family.

I sat in church that day, wanting at least something of that story to be told—because, after all, it was his story, all of it, good and bad, a story that needed to be told, which may well be why I’m telling you now. He was no simple pioneer; he was as painfully human as any of the sons of Adam.

But I wondered, too, about the source of my almost angry desire for someone to tell everything, to tell the truth itself, to at least make mention of something of what I knew of his life, of what many had to know. Why was it that I wanted the whole story narrated—maybe not in detail, but at least by reference, at least a frame? When not a word of that was said, the funeral pathetically generic, cynicism rose in me like a storm. I waited for even the slightest mention of the man’s life, but heard nothing but an old, old story.

Maybe it was just me. That’s what I told myself, and then I wondered if that desire was simply the writer in me, the one who has believed in the redeeming truth of our stories. And if so, was that impulse commendable or appalling?

I honestly didn’t know. The retired preacher went on and on without saying a word about the very real path of the professor’s life. The obit mentioned that once upon a time, he’d been given a governor’s award for his volunteer service to the blind; but there was nothing else there, except the list of children and grandchildren and “his high school sweetheart.”

I’m 62 years old, and I’ve thought of myself as a writer for most of my life; but I wondered right then about my own goals, my aspirations, about the stories I really, really want to tell. Why was it so painful for me to sit in a funeral that said nothing at all about the man’s life?

And then I heard a voice from a friend. The preacher at the professor’s funeral said he’d come across a passage from a commentary on Psalm 121, something from a man he’s admired—Eugene Peterson; and this is what he quoted at the end of a sermon that said absolutely nothing of everything I’ve just told you:

The Christian life is not a quiet escape to a garden where we can walk and talk uninterruptedly with our Lord; not a fantasy trip to a heavenly city where we can compare our blue ribbons and gold medals with others who have made it to the winner’s circle. The Christian life is going to God. In going to God Christians travel the same ground that everyone else walks on, breathe the same air, drink the same water, shop in the same stores, read the same newspapers, are citizens under the same governments, pay the same prices for groceries and gasoline, fear the same dangers, are subject to the same pressures, get the same distresses, are buried in the same ground.
The difference is that each step we walk, each breath we breathe, we know we are preserved by God, we know we are accompanied by God, we know we are ruled by God; and therefore no matter what doubts we endure or what accidents we experience, the Lord will preserve us from evil, he will keep our life.

Psalm 121 seemed such an unlikely choice for the professor, but it really is Great Plains huge, spacious enough not only for the gentle giant but also for all his woes and miseries, both those by which he was victimized as well as those for which he was himself responsible; Psalm 121 is broad and open enough for him, and for all of us and all of our stories, because we’re all in there somewhere.

So here’s what I’m thinking—that at that funeral what was said by the preacher was what needed to be said, what had to be said: a soft-spoken, gentle giant of a sinner had now left a world of beautiful days and simply gone home. What had to be said was that he’d loved the Lord, that he’d suffered the travail that is our lot in this vale of tears, and that, remarkably, Psalm 121, the text for his funeral, the pioneer professor’s own death song, offered him comfort and peace during those days when he did the hard work of dying, a psalm that names the Lord as our keeper six times in eight verses. It matters not a whit that if anyone had a right to testify against God’s ever-abiding love, this gentle man did.

At the end, what he wanted said was that the sun would not harm us by day, nor the moon by night, and that the Lord will watch over our lives, our comings and goings both now and forevermore. That was the balm he carried with him into death, the promise he wanted told.

The writer in me had waited for at least some mention of the details to bear witness to all that confidence. I wanted to be shown and not told, wanted to hear a recitation of the earthly story, at least in outline.

But that which couldn’t be spoken, wasn’t.

And I’m saying it now, I guess, for better or for worse.

Right there in church, in an odd way, what wasn’t said made Psalm 121 magnificently more memorable, spacious enough to hold my story too, and all of ours.

What couldn’t be said made what was said—the amazing grace of our God—even more remarkable, if that makes sense—and it really doesn’t. Grace, I mean.

That it’s real—grace, that is—that’s enough to make every day beautiful down here on the green edge of the Great Plains.

That’s what I learned from what wasn’t said at the professor’s funeral, and, blessedly, what was.

James Calvin Schaap is professor of English at Dordt College. His most recent work includes Honest to God: Psalms for Scribbers, Scrawlers, and Sketchers and Rehoboth: A Place for Us: An Album of Family Stories, both published last year by FaithAlive.