Althea Genler's Subtle Memorial Blessing
Stories
Scenes of Glory
Subplots of God's Long Story
Object:
Emphasis or special occasion: Prayer
Chapter 12
Althea Genler's Subtle Memorial Blessing
Mark 4:10-12; Jude 24-25
We are gathered today to remember and to celebrate the life of Althea Sturm Genler. She was extraordinary by any standard. She was my dear friend and often my advisor. After I also moved to Oregon, I was privileged to know Max for three years and Althea for seven. They sort of adopted me as the child they never bore.
Althea, first with Max and me, and after his death, just with me, complained how pedantic, plodding, and predictable were the few sermons she heard in her youth. As we discussed the biblical message, she said, "Why don't preachers take the Bible as their form instead of just as content? The Bible is mostly stories, and interesting stories at that. It's filled with poetry, even an immortal drama in Job -- not to mention the drama of the book of Revelation. Why so brutally literal all the time, constantly explaining everything, moralizing, every sermon sounding the same no matter what part of the Bible its text? Jesus was more flexible, doing his best teaching with parables. God doesn't merely give commandments. Sometimes God gives provocative suggestions." You can probably hear Althea say that. English teacher through and through.
Granting Althea's wishes, you've heard this morning two Bible texts: one about the obscurity of Jesus' teaching and the other a blessing from Jude. She insisted upon Jesus' saying that his parables were hard to understand. She said, "It's my funeral and they're my friends. Let them figure it out. If they can't figure it out, bless them anyway." I'm sure you hear her voice behind those words, too.
In Althea's memory, I share with you the funeral meditation she and I planned together over the last eight months. Her dictating, my writing. Here follows "Althea Genler's Subtle Memorial Blessing," as she titled it, crafted first over coffee and Oreos in her breakfast nook and finally beside her hospital bed.
Althea Sturm stood beside her shiny Honda Accord, gray, 4,700 miles on the odometer. It had been packed for an hour. Althea was always early, the result of her German genes, she said. She leaned against the car, looking at her watch, waiting. From excitement she hadn't slept well for three nights.
Montana's late summer morning was already warm. The violent thunderstorms, the gully-washers of the week before, only made it hotter with increased humidity. What an irrational time to begin public school instruction -- the same mystery she'd pondered for each of the forty previous Montana autumns.
Althea listened for fall's first bell to ring at Custer County District High School. She always had an apartment near the school. So, from her home she always heard the cars of the early students. She informed Marla Huffman that on the first day of school all students with automobiles drove to school. If their family had two automobiles, on the first day of school the student would somehow drive both. Last week, Marla Huffman moved into the classroom that Althea taught in for 22 years, and this morning Marla, too, was waiting, only inside Custer County District High School instead of outside.
Althea remembered last June's final bell of the spring. "Doom's high, trembling gong," she named it. Now, across the late summer morning, the bell finally announced the first day of school. Althea sighed, stepped into the car, looked back at her apartment, and drove two blocks to the high school. The marquee in front of the three-story brick building announced the first football game for the Custer County Cowboys -- last year's state champs. She drove slowly, then stopped. Marla was at the window of Althea's old classroom. They waved. Althea mouthed, "Good-bye," and she was off on her great adventure.
She drove north on Highway 59, crossing the Yellowstone River's shallow, late summer flow. At the top of Airport Hill she glanced in her rearview mirror for her last sight of Miles City. It looked like an oasis against the brown hills that held it in the valley.
She was on the rolling plains, able upon a rise to see for twenty or thirty miles. She always felt expansive when she drove out of the Yellowstone Valley and onto the plains. When she first moved to Miles City, the spreading plains seemed barren and oppressive. Now, her being able to see for miles was freeing, but she didn't feel free.
"Am I really done?" Her voice in the car sounded fuller than speaking outside, not quite like singing in the shower, but enough change to sound as if she were speaking to someone, though she wasn't.
"Am I retired? I've the pension checks to prove that. But have I completed my task, learned all I should learn, taught all I should teach? I think not, but I am leaving, nonetheless."
Nearly two-thirds of her life ago she arrived in Miles City, Althea Sturm, graduate teacher. Across the decades she learned that the area she was driving in produced the richest grazing grass in the world -- during wet cycles. During a dry cycle, the soil could blow five states away. Now she would explore more fully the eastern Montana plains that had surrounded her for four decades. She carried contingency plans for western North Dakota and potential forays into southern Saskatchewan. She even mused upon the different possibility, slim indeed, of driving to Oregon. Almost certainly she wouldn't continue to Oregon.
She planned to photograph the remains of old schoolhouses on the plains. Aided by the interlibrary loan, she spent her first summer of retirement eating on a TV-tray, because maps and books covered her dining table. Her intention was to leave upon the first day of school after retirement. And she did. She could hardly believe it. She often devised vacations: a week with a wagon train on the old Oregon Trail, rafting and camping down the Colorado River, backpacking in the Rockies. Although she ordered the brochures and made phone calls, her vacations were usually driving to Chicago to see family, taking summer courses at Eastern Montana or Montana State, or just reading. A few times on her vacations she attempted to write a novel, but never finished.
Althea didn't regret not leaping out on great treks. Because the truth was, and you know it well, she loved two things above all: teaching and reading -- whether it be the classics or science fiction, poetry or Gothic romances. Marla Huffman said that if the library issued frequent flyer miles for checking out books, Althea could have circled the globe nineteen dozen times.
Althea saw a few scattered wheat fields laid out in strips of fallow and planted, so straight north and south you could set Polaris by them. "All right. Milepost 46." She became alert. She wasn't going to forsake the main road to view new buildings, although a few elementary schools functioned out here, tucked away in the land's gentle folds. She planned to photograph the relics, the ruins. In some places she expected only a foundation's rock outline.
Four antelope to the left, and empty as far as she looked in every direction. People once lived here by the hundreds, after the railroads pressured Congress to pass the ill-fated Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. Althea wasn't concerned about most that occurred upon these plains: that General Nelson A. Miles chased Indians at fifty below zero in the winter of 1876 to '77 to punish Custer's killers, or that the last buffalo of the great northern herd had been shot in 1886 near Jordan. She thought only of the homesteaders who came later, two families on every square mile: The communities, stores, and transfer companies that sprang up as hardworking, or desperate, or greedy, or stupid people came to take what they were told was free -- or almost free; to stack sod for houses, or burrow caves into the ground, or tack tar paper onto shacks; to bust the sod with horses or mules or oxen; to work from morning until dark digging wells, building roads, even forming lodges; to cut and drag trees -- always from far away; to string barbed wire, and make meals and bear children and wash clothes on Mondays; and to suffer all their labor blown away or eaten by grasshoppers in little over a decade.
Althea felt a painful kinship with those homesteaders. She taught their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She viewed their photographs and inspected their tack and gramophones in the Range Riders Museum. She came now to inspect their artifacts left behind at the focal point of combined labor and intentional civilization called "the schoolhouse."
She attended such a schoolhouse in her third grade, her childhood's only year not spent in Chicago. The school had two rooms and two teachers, not exactly on the plains, but nestled into a stubbly Nebraska woodland. The building, half a mile from the farm her parents failed at managing, was also used for worship -- on Saturdays by Seventh Day Adventists and on Sundays by Baptists. Althea's parents sent her to one, then to the other, for a few weeks at a time. How strange to spend a week in the building learning longhand and multiplication, studying geography and history, and then to enter and encounter a few huddled Bible classes, followed by a preacher who always stood behind the desk to yell his sermon.
She much preferred school to church and told her parents so. Because they didn't attend and she could work a little for them on the weekends, they usually kept her out of church. When she was fourteen and living in Chicago again, she decided to keep herself out of church.
There, milepost 48. She slowed and turned east onto the red scoria gravel, the outcome of a burned underground coal seam now crushed and spread like a dirty pink line across the flats. It wasn't graded as well as most county roads, but it aimed straight: East/Northeast across a two-mile flat, then over a rise. It continued three miles on a flat only to ascend another rise that looked just like the last. Her directions weren't precise about this site. Not the way she wanted to start. But onward, her car seeming to steer itself on its straight course. She hummed a little, already imagining the dozens of sites to photograph and annotate for the album she would cherish for the rest of her life. She was contemplating possible colors for the album's cover as she crested the lowest of hills suddenly to meet a sharp turn to the right and on the left a reedy pond. Althea jammed on the brake and she spun the wheel to the right, skidding with an almost graceful, completely unstoppable slide, until the left front of her brand-new, shiny gray Honda Accord hit the mud at the pond's edge.
By training, Althea sat rigidly in her seat, although she wanted to go limp. Years of standing before uninterested or belligerent students held her erect when she'd rather slump. After a few deep breaths she shifted into reverse, yet the front wheels only spun and she felt the car sink instantly. She was surprised. She thought her front tires were on solid ground. She turned off the engine and opened her door. Water up to the floor. She slid across the seat and opened the passenger's door. She held onto the roof, then sprang out of the car onto what appeared nearly solid ground, but which wasn't.
Three steps out of the mess and her shoes were covered. "Gumbo," she said. Out here the clay was "gumbo," and people seldom spoke the word without a modifier, most often, "damned gumbo." She walked away from the car to examine the problem. The pond was 25 yards across and ringed with low hills. She compared it to a big brown saucer of mud with a car pasted on the edge, a car that wasn't coming out under its own power.
"Cell phone," she said, snapping her fingers. She stepped through the gumbo and leaped onto her knees on the front seat. Camera equipment lay in state upon the backseat, but in her tired muddle she'd forgotten the cell phone.
She held her muddy feet out the door and took off her shoes, banged them against the outside and closed the door to wait. Someone will come soon. She saw tire tracks from after the rain.
Doing nothing wasn't natural for Althea. She could be reading, but she didn't want to put on her shoes and wade to the trunk for a book. And she was tired. What could she do? She considered taking a photograph out the window as the first snapshot for her album, but decided she didn't want to explain it every time she showed her collection to someone.
She could pray. Of course. That's the thing to do. She didn't pray much, but she didn't have anything against God, even if she hadn't prayed for a few months or, honestly, for years. She cleared her throat as she folded her hands and bowed her head. "O Thou who wast ... O Thou who didst...." She swallowed. "O Thou who hast...." Nothing more, except that she could hear Max laughing at her. Forty-plus years away and she could still hear him laugh. Max Genler was the closest she'd gotten to religion since she was fourteen. She met him junior year at the University of Chicago. He invited her to a Christian meeting, and she'd gone a few times -- more because of interest in Max than in faith. A few times Max asked, "Althea, would you open us with prayer?" Or, "Will you close us with prayer, Althea?" She declined. But once the discussion was about prayer. She complained, "Why do you all take God so casually? You chat in your prayers. If you address God, you should be serious."
"I'm serious," Max said, and laughed.
"Well you don't sound like it, all chummy with the almighty. If you were introduced to the Queen of England you wouldn't say, 'Hi, Queen.' "
"You can be serious and intimate at the same time. Married people are."
"It's not the same, Max. If you're going to talk to God, it should sound a little more, well, intense, than a conversation over the back fence."
"Althea, if you pray in a fancy way, you'll only pray about fancy things. God is over the back fence. God is here in all of life, so why not take all of life to God in prayer -- as you would to any friend?"
"You can't shrink God into a mere pal."
"But why not feel comfortable while speaking to God?"
"Comfortable? No, you should be absolutely alert so you can be severely honest."
"I think you should be comfortable, so comfortable that you can fall asleep praying."
"That's not comfort. That's sloth."
"Shouldn't you feel so safe with God that you can fall asleep with him, as you can fall asleep with a person you love?"
"No." Her voice became tight at the thought of sleeping with someone she loved. "Not with God. It's the greatest affront to demote God to little more than human."
"All right, then, show us how to pray." Max sat there grinning, arms crossed, and she didn't want him to get the better of her. She bowed her head with a snap, clasped her hands with the force of climbing a rope, and prayed, "O Thou who hast...."
Max started laughing. And you know that no one, not even Althea while attempting to prove a point, could withstand his laughter. She laughed, too.
Recently she'd thought a lot about Max, since she saw his name on the university's list of alumni contributors. She couldn't resist a search for his email address and writing a letter about herself, stating that she was now retiring, if still not shy.
Althea sat behind the wheel and concentrated her mind for prayer. "O Thou...."
Max had responded that very evening: an email telling of his two sons and one daughter, his wife, Leah's, death nine years before, his plan to move from southern California to Oregon in early spring -- and an invitation to her to stretch her expedition to Oregon. After her years in the classroom, not much could surprise Althea; but, she waited four days to respond to "Maximum Genler," as his friends called him. She felt strange at her computer, touching the key to send this message to him. Maybe she loved Max in college. She didn't know. She grew up hearing her mother say, "Marry in haste, repent at leisure." When she was young she thought her mother was angry in saying it, but when she was older, her mother seemed only sad. Althea so feared marrying in haste that she never married.
She tried again, "O Thou Eternal Spirit...."
A man was knocking on the driver's window. "You okay?"
The sun was far in the west. She leaned away from the window and paused for a second, then rolled it down, "Yes, I fell asleep."
He was standing knee-deep in water.
"Want help out of the car?"
"I've gotten out once. I was waiting for someone to come by."
"I'll help you out. This is quite a loblolly. Come to the other side." He circled to the right of the car. Althea opened the door and handed him her shoes. He hefted her out of the car and onto dry ground in about two seconds. Max had lifted her once, and she'd liked that.
"I was so used to the road being straight," Althea said quickly, "and I came over this hill, and here's a pond."
"Uh huh. You get used to 'straight' and suddenly you hit the labyrinthine ways."
Althea, listening politely while looking at the condition of her car, jerked her head toward him. "Labyrinthine ways?"
"Like Francis Thompson's poem."
"Yes, but, but --"
"One of the poems in your class: 'The Hound of Heaven,' about not being able to flee God."
"You know me?"
"You're Miss Sturm. I recognized you from your picture in the Star when you retired."
"Oh," Althea said. She'd been lifted out of her car by a man who knew her but whom she didn't know.
"I'm Henry Anderson, Anderson with 'oh en.' Hank." They shook hands. "You had both my kids in school: Carl and Marie."
"Yes."
"On spring vacation, Carl memorized the poem by reciting it every night and three times on the Sunday before he went back to school. I guess we learned it with him."
"Carl was one of my favorite students."
Hank Anderson smiled until his teeth looked like the grill on a '55 Buick.
"But I thought Carl and Marie lived in town."
"With my brother, Sam. They stayed with him and my sister-in-law so they could live in Miles and attend Custer."
"So you didn't see your children much during the school year."
"Just on vacations and a few weekends; but we all agreed, my wife and I and the kids. They wanted to attend Custer, and especially your class."
Althea stepped back. She stood erect. She felt weak.
"Their cousins, Rosalyn and Derek, told them about you," Hank said. "They wanted to be in your class. The four cousins all liked to read and write. Carl became editor of the University of Montana's Kaimin. He's now staff writer for the Great Falls Tribune."
"He sent me a graduation announcement and I mailed him congratulations."
"He showed us your card."
For once Althea didn't have anything to say.
"I can hook on and get you out in a minute," Hank said, pointing to his flatbed truck. It sat idling with half a load of hay bales. She put on her shoes and Hank carried her back to the car, setting her down as gently as a nurse placing a newborn in an incubator. He drove behind, connected a chain, and the car was quickly out and undamaged.
"I very much appreciate your help Mr. Anderson. I didn't know if anyone lived on this road."
"We do. A couple miles farther. My family has lived here over ninety years. Would you come up for dinner?" He cocked his head toward his home with the question. "Alice would love to put on another plate."
"No, no," Althea said, "I've got a long ways to go yet, and it's getting late." Like a native she nodded to the sun instead of looking at her watch.
They shook hands.
"Oh," she said as she turned to leave, "is there an old schoolhouse down this road?"
"No."
"Ever been a schoolhouse down this road?"
"No."
"Well, thank you again."
"I couldn't have been happier to meet you."
Arriving back at Highway 59, she turned off the engine. One whole day gone and no schoolhouse. Nearly a ruinous accident. Failed completely on the first attempt. It was 6:40. Considering the energy needed to travel, maybe she should return to Miles City, sleep in her own bed, get her cell phone, maybe take a couple days for further inquiries about the schoolhouse she missed. She looked south toward home.
She started the car and accelerated faster than usual -- going north. She set her cruise control at 73 and didn't look in her rearview mirror. At milepost 65, she passed the big rocks set up as corner posts for fences. She could stay in Jordan. Since no game was in season, the Garfield Hotel & Motel would have a room.
"Well Lord, I guess the teaching was a good thing, and it's nice to find that out, if only afterward. Let's see if retirement will be a good thing, too. And, Lord, what do you think about Oregon?"
Max and Althea are now with God and that's a comfort. Time is God's gift to help heal our grief. But I'm sure that for the rest of my life whenever I hear an older couple laughing, I'll still miss Max and Althea.
Althea directed that this service end with a blessing from Jude. I thought she'd want it from the King James Bible -- good Elizabethan language. "No," she said, "the blessing is for my friends and relatives. Let them hear it in their language. Bless them, even if they haven't understood my story. That's how God treated me all my life."
Receive God's blessing from our friend, Althea Sturm Genler. "Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen."
Discussion Questions
1. What immediate responses do you have to the story?
2. Do you identify with a character in the story? If yes, how and why do you identify with the person? If no, why don't you identify with anyone in the story?
3. Would you like to have a conversation with a character in the story? What would you say, ask, or suggest to the person? Why?
4. How does the story bring the biblical text into a clearer focus for you?
5. How would you improve or modify the story? Why?
6. Has a special friend helped you understand prayer?
7. Have you struggled between formal and informal language in prayer? What have you most recently experienced or learned of prayer?
8. Has God used some particularly twisted circumstances to lead you to deeper faith? If you've read Francis Thompson's poem, "The Hound of Heaven," what connections do you see between the poem and Althea's story?
9. What further depths of meaning, symbols, connections with, or applications of the biblical faith do you find in the story?
10. Since Jesus Christ has risen from the dead and is alive among us through his Holy Spirit, what of this story would you like Christ to activate in your life?
Chapter 12
Althea Genler's Subtle Memorial Blessing
Mark 4:10-12; Jude 24-25
We are gathered today to remember and to celebrate the life of Althea Sturm Genler. She was extraordinary by any standard. She was my dear friend and often my advisor. After I also moved to Oregon, I was privileged to know Max for three years and Althea for seven. They sort of adopted me as the child they never bore.
Althea, first with Max and me, and after his death, just with me, complained how pedantic, plodding, and predictable were the few sermons she heard in her youth. As we discussed the biblical message, she said, "Why don't preachers take the Bible as their form instead of just as content? The Bible is mostly stories, and interesting stories at that. It's filled with poetry, even an immortal drama in Job -- not to mention the drama of the book of Revelation. Why so brutally literal all the time, constantly explaining everything, moralizing, every sermon sounding the same no matter what part of the Bible its text? Jesus was more flexible, doing his best teaching with parables. God doesn't merely give commandments. Sometimes God gives provocative suggestions." You can probably hear Althea say that. English teacher through and through.
Granting Althea's wishes, you've heard this morning two Bible texts: one about the obscurity of Jesus' teaching and the other a blessing from Jude. She insisted upon Jesus' saying that his parables were hard to understand. She said, "It's my funeral and they're my friends. Let them figure it out. If they can't figure it out, bless them anyway." I'm sure you hear her voice behind those words, too.
In Althea's memory, I share with you the funeral meditation she and I planned together over the last eight months. Her dictating, my writing. Here follows "Althea Genler's Subtle Memorial Blessing," as she titled it, crafted first over coffee and Oreos in her breakfast nook and finally beside her hospital bed.
Althea Sturm stood beside her shiny Honda Accord, gray, 4,700 miles on the odometer. It had been packed for an hour. Althea was always early, the result of her German genes, she said. She leaned against the car, looking at her watch, waiting. From excitement she hadn't slept well for three nights.
Montana's late summer morning was already warm. The violent thunderstorms, the gully-washers of the week before, only made it hotter with increased humidity. What an irrational time to begin public school instruction -- the same mystery she'd pondered for each of the forty previous Montana autumns.
Althea listened for fall's first bell to ring at Custer County District High School. She always had an apartment near the school. So, from her home she always heard the cars of the early students. She informed Marla Huffman that on the first day of school all students with automobiles drove to school. If their family had two automobiles, on the first day of school the student would somehow drive both. Last week, Marla Huffman moved into the classroom that Althea taught in for 22 years, and this morning Marla, too, was waiting, only inside Custer County District High School instead of outside.
Althea remembered last June's final bell of the spring. "Doom's high, trembling gong," she named it. Now, across the late summer morning, the bell finally announced the first day of school. Althea sighed, stepped into the car, looked back at her apartment, and drove two blocks to the high school. The marquee in front of the three-story brick building announced the first football game for the Custer County Cowboys -- last year's state champs. She drove slowly, then stopped. Marla was at the window of Althea's old classroom. They waved. Althea mouthed, "Good-bye," and she was off on her great adventure.
She drove north on Highway 59, crossing the Yellowstone River's shallow, late summer flow. At the top of Airport Hill she glanced in her rearview mirror for her last sight of Miles City. It looked like an oasis against the brown hills that held it in the valley.
She was on the rolling plains, able upon a rise to see for twenty or thirty miles. She always felt expansive when she drove out of the Yellowstone Valley and onto the plains. When she first moved to Miles City, the spreading plains seemed barren and oppressive. Now, her being able to see for miles was freeing, but she didn't feel free.
"Am I really done?" Her voice in the car sounded fuller than speaking outside, not quite like singing in the shower, but enough change to sound as if she were speaking to someone, though she wasn't.
"Am I retired? I've the pension checks to prove that. But have I completed my task, learned all I should learn, taught all I should teach? I think not, but I am leaving, nonetheless."
Nearly two-thirds of her life ago she arrived in Miles City, Althea Sturm, graduate teacher. Across the decades she learned that the area she was driving in produced the richest grazing grass in the world -- during wet cycles. During a dry cycle, the soil could blow five states away. Now she would explore more fully the eastern Montana plains that had surrounded her for four decades. She carried contingency plans for western North Dakota and potential forays into southern Saskatchewan. She even mused upon the different possibility, slim indeed, of driving to Oregon. Almost certainly she wouldn't continue to Oregon.
She planned to photograph the remains of old schoolhouses on the plains. Aided by the interlibrary loan, she spent her first summer of retirement eating on a TV-tray, because maps and books covered her dining table. Her intention was to leave upon the first day of school after retirement. And she did. She could hardly believe it. She often devised vacations: a week with a wagon train on the old Oregon Trail, rafting and camping down the Colorado River, backpacking in the Rockies. Although she ordered the brochures and made phone calls, her vacations were usually driving to Chicago to see family, taking summer courses at Eastern Montana or Montana State, or just reading. A few times on her vacations she attempted to write a novel, but never finished.
Althea didn't regret not leaping out on great treks. Because the truth was, and you know it well, she loved two things above all: teaching and reading -- whether it be the classics or science fiction, poetry or Gothic romances. Marla Huffman said that if the library issued frequent flyer miles for checking out books, Althea could have circled the globe nineteen dozen times.
Althea saw a few scattered wheat fields laid out in strips of fallow and planted, so straight north and south you could set Polaris by them. "All right. Milepost 46." She became alert. She wasn't going to forsake the main road to view new buildings, although a few elementary schools functioned out here, tucked away in the land's gentle folds. She planned to photograph the relics, the ruins. In some places she expected only a foundation's rock outline.
Four antelope to the left, and empty as far as she looked in every direction. People once lived here by the hundreds, after the railroads pressured Congress to pass the ill-fated Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. Althea wasn't concerned about most that occurred upon these plains: that General Nelson A. Miles chased Indians at fifty below zero in the winter of 1876 to '77 to punish Custer's killers, or that the last buffalo of the great northern herd had been shot in 1886 near Jordan. She thought only of the homesteaders who came later, two families on every square mile: The communities, stores, and transfer companies that sprang up as hardworking, or desperate, or greedy, or stupid people came to take what they were told was free -- or almost free; to stack sod for houses, or burrow caves into the ground, or tack tar paper onto shacks; to bust the sod with horses or mules or oxen; to work from morning until dark digging wells, building roads, even forming lodges; to cut and drag trees -- always from far away; to string barbed wire, and make meals and bear children and wash clothes on Mondays; and to suffer all their labor blown away or eaten by grasshoppers in little over a decade.
Althea felt a painful kinship with those homesteaders. She taught their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She viewed their photographs and inspected their tack and gramophones in the Range Riders Museum. She came now to inspect their artifacts left behind at the focal point of combined labor and intentional civilization called "the schoolhouse."
She attended such a schoolhouse in her third grade, her childhood's only year not spent in Chicago. The school had two rooms and two teachers, not exactly on the plains, but nestled into a stubbly Nebraska woodland. The building, half a mile from the farm her parents failed at managing, was also used for worship -- on Saturdays by Seventh Day Adventists and on Sundays by Baptists. Althea's parents sent her to one, then to the other, for a few weeks at a time. How strange to spend a week in the building learning longhand and multiplication, studying geography and history, and then to enter and encounter a few huddled Bible classes, followed by a preacher who always stood behind the desk to yell his sermon.
She much preferred school to church and told her parents so. Because they didn't attend and she could work a little for them on the weekends, they usually kept her out of church. When she was fourteen and living in Chicago again, she decided to keep herself out of church.
There, milepost 48. She slowed and turned east onto the red scoria gravel, the outcome of a burned underground coal seam now crushed and spread like a dirty pink line across the flats. It wasn't graded as well as most county roads, but it aimed straight: East/Northeast across a two-mile flat, then over a rise. It continued three miles on a flat only to ascend another rise that looked just like the last. Her directions weren't precise about this site. Not the way she wanted to start. But onward, her car seeming to steer itself on its straight course. She hummed a little, already imagining the dozens of sites to photograph and annotate for the album she would cherish for the rest of her life. She was contemplating possible colors for the album's cover as she crested the lowest of hills suddenly to meet a sharp turn to the right and on the left a reedy pond. Althea jammed on the brake and she spun the wheel to the right, skidding with an almost graceful, completely unstoppable slide, until the left front of her brand-new, shiny gray Honda Accord hit the mud at the pond's edge.
By training, Althea sat rigidly in her seat, although she wanted to go limp. Years of standing before uninterested or belligerent students held her erect when she'd rather slump. After a few deep breaths she shifted into reverse, yet the front wheels only spun and she felt the car sink instantly. She was surprised. She thought her front tires were on solid ground. She turned off the engine and opened her door. Water up to the floor. She slid across the seat and opened the passenger's door. She held onto the roof, then sprang out of the car onto what appeared nearly solid ground, but which wasn't.
Three steps out of the mess and her shoes were covered. "Gumbo," she said. Out here the clay was "gumbo," and people seldom spoke the word without a modifier, most often, "damned gumbo." She walked away from the car to examine the problem. The pond was 25 yards across and ringed with low hills. She compared it to a big brown saucer of mud with a car pasted on the edge, a car that wasn't coming out under its own power.
"Cell phone," she said, snapping her fingers. She stepped through the gumbo and leaped onto her knees on the front seat. Camera equipment lay in state upon the backseat, but in her tired muddle she'd forgotten the cell phone.
She held her muddy feet out the door and took off her shoes, banged them against the outside and closed the door to wait. Someone will come soon. She saw tire tracks from after the rain.
Doing nothing wasn't natural for Althea. She could be reading, but she didn't want to put on her shoes and wade to the trunk for a book. And she was tired. What could she do? She considered taking a photograph out the window as the first snapshot for her album, but decided she didn't want to explain it every time she showed her collection to someone.
She could pray. Of course. That's the thing to do. She didn't pray much, but she didn't have anything against God, even if she hadn't prayed for a few months or, honestly, for years. She cleared her throat as she folded her hands and bowed her head. "O Thou who wast ... O Thou who didst...." She swallowed. "O Thou who hast...." Nothing more, except that she could hear Max laughing at her. Forty-plus years away and she could still hear him laugh. Max Genler was the closest she'd gotten to religion since she was fourteen. She met him junior year at the University of Chicago. He invited her to a Christian meeting, and she'd gone a few times -- more because of interest in Max than in faith. A few times Max asked, "Althea, would you open us with prayer?" Or, "Will you close us with prayer, Althea?" She declined. But once the discussion was about prayer. She complained, "Why do you all take God so casually? You chat in your prayers. If you address God, you should be serious."
"I'm serious," Max said, and laughed.
"Well you don't sound like it, all chummy with the almighty. If you were introduced to the Queen of England you wouldn't say, 'Hi, Queen.' "
"You can be serious and intimate at the same time. Married people are."
"It's not the same, Max. If you're going to talk to God, it should sound a little more, well, intense, than a conversation over the back fence."
"Althea, if you pray in a fancy way, you'll only pray about fancy things. God is over the back fence. God is here in all of life, so why not take all of life to God in prayer -- as you would to any friend?"
"You can't shrink God into a mere pal."
"But why not feel comfortable while speaking to God?"
"Comfortable? No, you should be absolutely alert so you can be severely honest."
"I think you should be comfortable, so comfortable that you can fall asleep praying."
"That's not comfort. That's sloth."
"Shouldn't you feel so safe with God that you can fall asleep with him, as you can fall asleep with a person you love?"
"No." Her voice became tight at the thought of sleeping with someone she loved. "Not with God. It's the greatest affront to demote God to little more than human."
"All right, then, show us how to pray." Max sat there grinning, arms crossed, and she didn't want him to get the better of her. She bowed her head with a snap, clasped her hands with the force of climbing a rope, and prayed, "O Thou who hast...."
Max started laughing. And you know that no one, not even Althea while attempting to prove a point, could withstand his laughter. She laughed, too.
Recently she'd thought a lot about Max, since she saw his name on the university's list of alumni contributors. She couldn't resist a search for his email address and writing a letter about herself, stating that she was now retiring, if still not shy.
Althea sat behind the wheel and concentrated her mind for prayer. "O Thou...."
Max had responded that very evening: an email telling of his two sons and one daughter, his wife, Leah's, death nine years before, his plan to move from southern California to Oregon in early spring -- and an invitation to her to stretch her expedition to Oregon. After her years in the classroom, not much could surprise Althea; but, she waited four days to respond to "Maximum Genler," as his friends called him. She felt strange at her computer, touching the key to send this message to him. Maybe she loved Max in college. She didn't know. She grew up hearing her mother say, "Marry in haste, repent at leisure." When she was young she thought her mother was angry in saying it, but when she was older, her mother seemed only sad. Althea so feared marrying in haste that she never married.
She tried again, "O Thou Eternal Spirit...."
A man was knocking on the driver's window. "You okay?"
The sun was far in the west. She leaned away from the window and paused for a second, then rolled it down, "Yes, I fell asleep."
He was standing knee-deep in water.
"Want help out of the car?"
"I've gotten out once. I was waiting for someone to come by."
"I'll help you out. This is quite a loblolly. Come to the other side." He circled to the right of the car. Althea opened the door and handed him her shoes. He hefted her out of the car and onto dry ground in about two seconds. Max had lifted her once, and she'd liked that.
"I was so used to the road being straight," Althea said quickly, "and I came over this hill, and here's a pond."
"Uh huh. You get used to 'straight' and suddenly you hit the labyrinthine ways."
Althea, listening politely while looking at the condition of her car, jerked her head toward him. "Labyrinthine ways?"
"Like Francis Thompson's poem."
"Yes, but, but --"
"One of the poems in your class: 'The Hound of Heaven,' about not being able to flee God."
"You know me?"
"You're Miss Sturm. I recognized you from your picture in the Star when you retired."
"Oh," Althea said. She'd been lifted out of her car by a man who knew her but whom she didn't know.
"I'm Henry Anderson, Anderson with 'oh en.' Hank." They shook hands. "You had both my kids in school: Carl and Marie."
"Yes."
"On spring vacation, Carl memorized the poem by reciting it every night and three times on the Sunday before he went back to school. I guess we learned it with him."
"Carl was one of my favorite students."
Hank Anderson smiled until his teeth looked like the grill on a '55 Buick.
"But I thought Carl and Marie lived in town."
"With my brother, Sam. They stayed with him and my sister-in-law so they could live in Miles and attend Custer."
"So you didn't see your children much during the school year."
"Just on vacations and a few weekends; but we all agreed, my wife and I and the kids. They wanted to attend Custer, and especially your class."
Althea stepped back. She stood erect. She felt weak.
"Their cousins, Rosalyn and Derek, told them about you," Hank said. "They wanted to be in your class. The four cousins all liked to read and write. Carl became editor of the University of Montana's Kaimin. He's now staff writer for the Great Falls Tribune."
"He sent me a graduation announcement and I mailed him congratulations."
"He showed us your card."
For once Althea didn't have anything to say.
"I can hook on and get you out in a minute," Hank said, pointing to his flatbed truck. It sat idling with half a load of hay bales. She put on her shoes and Hank carried her back to the car, setting her down as gently as a nurse placing a newborn in an incubator. He drove behind, connected a chain, and the car was quickly out and undamaged.
"I very much appreciate your help Mr. Anderson. I didn't know if anyone lived on this road."
"We do. A couple miles farther. My family has lived here over ninety years. Would you come up for dinner?" He cocked his head toward his home with the question. "Alice would love to put on another plate."
"No, no," Althea said, "I've got a long ways to go yet, and it's getting late." Like a native she nodded to the sun instead of looking at her watch.
They shook hands.
"Oh," she said as she turned to leave, "is there an old schoolhouse down this road?"
"No."
"Ever been a schoolhouse down this road?"
"No."
"Well, thank you again."
"I couldn't have been happier to meet you."
Arriving back at Highway 59, she turned off the engine. One whole day gone and no schoolhouse. Nearly a ruinous accident. Failed completely on the first attempt. It was 6:40. Considering the energy needed to travel, maybe she should return to Miles City, sleep in her own bed, get her cell phone, maybe take a couple days for further inquiries about the schoolhouse she missed. She looked south toward home.
She started the car and accelerated faster than usual -- going north. She set her cruise control at 73 and didn't look in her rearview mirror. At milepost 65, she passed the big rocks set up as corner posts for fences. She could stay in Jordan. Since no game was in season, the Garfield Hotel & Motel would have a room.
"Well Lord, I guess the teaching was a good thing, and it's nice to find that out, if only afterward. Let's see if retirement will be a good thing, too. And, Lord, what do you think about Oregon?"
Max and Althea are now with God and that's a comfort. Time is God's gift to help heal our grief. But I'm sure that for the rest of my life whenever I hear an older couple laughing, I'll still miss Max and Althea.
Althea directed that this service end with a blessing from Jude. I thought she'd want it from the King James Bible -- good Elizabethan language. "No," she said, "the blessing is for my friends and relatives. Let them hear it in their language. Bless them, even if they haven't understood my story. That's how God treated me all my life."
Receive God's blessing from our friend, Althea Sturm Genler. "Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen."
Discussion Questions
1. What immediate responses do you have to the story?
2. Do you identify with a character in the story? If yes, how and why do you identify with the person? If no, why don't you identify with anyone in the story?
3. Would you like to have a conversation with a character in the story? What would you say, ask, or suggest to the person? Why?
4. How does the story bring the biblical text into a clearer focus for you?
5. How would you improve or modify the story? Why?
6. Has a special friend helped you understand prayer?
7. Have you struggled between formal and informal language in prayer? What have you most recently experienced or learned of prayer?
8. Has God used some particularly twisted circumstances to lead you to deeper faith? If you've read Francis Thompson's poem, "The Hound of Heaven," what connections do you see between the poem and Althea's story?
9. What further depths of meaning, symbols, connections with, or applications of the biblical faith do you find in the story?
10. Since Jesus Christ has risen from the dead and is alive among us through his Holy Spirit, what of this story would you like Christ to activate in your life?
