An Iowan Musing

Sunday Morning Musing

L"Uncle" Joe's passing was the end of a family era. He farmed land that had been in the family for over 100 years. The farm was in a small Iowa town that isn't on any maps and where all the buildings are surrounded by farmland. During the '70's his kids had to leave the farm to help pay the high interest rates on money borrowed for seed corn. That's how a farm works. You borrow money in the spring to help buy the seed and pay it back at harvest time. Now the "kids" are dispersed all over the country and it is doubtful the farm will stay in the family.

I was most moved by the funeral. Not the service in the packed country church, but what was happening outside. I sat on the stone wall of the front stairs. It was so quiet. The silence was only interrupted by the muffled singing coming from my relatives in the church.

As far as I could see was the September corn. Still green and with plump parcels of harvest-ready corn on the stalks. When the breeze wafted through, the tassels became "the gentle waves of grain." Here was the origin of the food we eat and the feed for the meat that goes with the potatoes. When there was no song coming from within the church, the world was quiet. Not just night-time stillness but no-human-sound quiet, a "be still and know" quiet. No matter your preference for spiritual expression, or denial of one, the Other was in that green blanket of corn.

This is America - not the derisive politics. It is what America was meant to be. Not a world power, not the military-industrial complex, as Eisenhower warned against, not a nation that waged war with questionable motives, not an America where there are those who want in the midst of such plenty.

I was gazing out of a fruitful America, an America where neighbors were old friends and strangers were new ones. Where joys were celebrated by all. Where destruction was an occasion to pitch-in and get it done, without those who had suffered the loss of home or grain bin asking. Where those who grieved at the passing of a loved one knew that those left behind, the elderly and the babes would be taken care of by the community.

And where road improvement meant another layer of gravel and oil being laid down and the grocery store was that acre patch growing outside the back door.

At that moment, I wished I could have invited every American to share my perch on the church steps. Sitting there, it would have been difficult to maintain our derisive polarities: right yelling at left, left screaming at right, conservatives ready to punch out liberals, and liberals at the ready to whine at the conservatives. In some way, there is a deep wisdom in "let us break bead together" or as I was thinking, "let us watch our grain grow together."

"Uncle" Joe was a Marine in the Big One and remained active in vet groups until he became too ill to participate. In the tiny community cemetery, half a cornfield down the dirt road from the church, he was laid to rest with full military honors. Even here we were surrounded by a wall of corn that held us mourners in walls of life affirming green. I had never been to a full military burial before. The words spoke of comradeship and duty, honor and service to country, freedom and liberty preserved. As the commands were barked out by the officer in charge, my hand flew to my heart, the civilian salute, as the flag was crisply folded to the telling of the meaning of its colors. It stayed over my heart as the chaplain gave the final benediction for a fallen hero and the flag was tenderly given to "Aunt" Edith.

The three volleys from seven riffles cracked through that guardian corn. An aged comrade held up a bugle (which hid a recorder) so that the sound of "Taps" played the casket to ground.
"This we know as we go,  God is nigh"

The last notes went out from that patch of Iowa and the sound waves kept traveling in growing circles. First across the corn, then to the great Mississippi, then to the coastlines.

We argue and connive so much that we forget what we are about. We have the resources to let the world thrive, let alone our own. We are the shining lamp of the Statue of Liberty who does not ask where those "homeless, tempest tossed" ones come from.  is not the property any specific sect of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindi, Buddhism. As Bede Griffiths taught the differences are like the fingers of a hand - only surface.  All are connected in their own way to the palm of the Divine,  So why do we fight over the ownership of the un-ownable.


I spent a moment in an Iowan cornfield and saw the remotest possibility of true American greatness. As RFK expressed "to see and ask why not." or to paraphrase Robert Frost
" So when at times the mob is swayed;
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like  an Iowan cornfield;
To stay our minds on and be staid."*

I wish you all a chance to find your own Iowa cornfield.

*(From "Choose Something Like A Star.")