Muriel White Stehouwer

On June 19, 2020, Muriel White Stehouwer passed peacefully into the presence of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Born Muriel Lydia Hunt on July 8, 1930, in Detroit, she was the older of two children of typical Irish/German immigrants who scraped together a living in the Depression era. She attended Wayne State University and met Robert White, also of Detroit, through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a ministry she supported throughout her life. Both were dedicated Christians who felt a calling to missionary service.

Muriel graduated in 1952 with a B.A. in English and married Robert the same year. After he completed medical school at Case Western University in Cleveland, where she taught English in a public school and bore her first child, they left the United States in 1954 to prepare for medical missions in Panama and Belgium before spending 10 years in the Congo. She had children in each of these locations.

They returned to the United States in 1965. Following brief stints in Birmingham, where her youngest child was born, and Adrian, Michigan, she moved with her husband and six children to Marquette, Michigan, where she lived for 13 years. There she was active in the Marquette Missionary Church, taught English at Northern Michigan University, and was instrumental in founding Pregnancy Services of Marquette, an institution dedicated to helping women find alternatives to abortion.

Her first husband died in 1982, and just over a year later she married Dr. Edward Stehouwer, also recently widowed, of Cadillac, Michigan. She was a faithful member of the Cadillac Christian Reformed Church and a longtime member of the Cadillac Community Orchestra. She invested her boundless energy in countless civic and church-related activities. She remained in Cadillac after the death of her second husband in 2010.

She will be remembered by literally hundreds of people in many countries as a faithful friend, trusted counselor, and dedicated follower of Jesus Christ. She reveled above all in her role as wife and mother and in serving in her church. She was preceded in death by her parents, one sister, and two husbands, who she felt were the best two men on the planet. She is survived by 4 sons living in Virginia, Scotland, Germany, and Kenya, respectively, 2 daughters in the San Francisco area, 3 stepchildren, 26 grandchildren, 7 step-grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren, and 3 great-step-grandchildren, not to mention 30 nieces and nephews and their prolific progeny. She leaves behind a legacy of a life well-lived for God to all those privileged to call her Mom, Grandma/Oma, Aunt, or simply “my friend.”

A memorial service to celebrate the life of Muriel will be held at 10:00 AM on Monday, June 22, 2020, at the Cadillac Christian Reformed Church in Cadillac with the Reverend Jeff Kroondyk officiating. Muriel’s final resting place will be the White Family Cemetery near Big Bay, Michigan.

In lieu of flowers, people are encouraged to donate memorial gifts in Muriel’s honor to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (intervarsity.org) or the Csehy Summer School of Music (csehy.org).

W. H. Auden, “Words and the Word,” in *Secondary Worlds* (1968). Still more true today.

In all ages, the technique of the Black Magician has been essentially the same. In all spells the words are deprived of their meanings and reduced to syllables or verbal noises. This may be done literally, as when magicians used to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards, or by reiterating a word over and over again as loudly as possible until it has become a mere sound. For millions of people today, words like communism, capitalism, imperialism, peace, freedom, democracy, have ceased to be words, the meaning of which can be inquired into and discussed, and have become right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee-reflex.

It makes no difference if the magic is being employed simply for the aggrandizement of the magician himself or if, as is more usual, he claims to be serving some good cause. Indeed, the better the cause he claims to be serving, the more evil he does…. Propaganda, like the sword, attempts to eliminate consent or dissent and, in our age, magical language has to a great extent replaced the sword.

Cities and the City of God, part 1

I ask you to pray for our cities. We’ve seen peaceful protests in Washington DC, New York, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to name just a few. We’ve also seen looting, rioting, and murder. The homicide rate in Los Angeles is up 250% in June. 19 people were murdered in 24 hours in Chicago last Sunday, the deadliest day in that city since 1961. My daughter and her family live in South Bend but they have been sheltering in place in Chesterfield, a suburb of a city named after a French king, the only one to be canonized a saint. 21 people were shot, six fatally, last weekend in St Louis. 

I’m not a political scientist. I’m a biblical theologian. I thought I’d write a short biblical theology of cities to run over the next two months. This three-part series I’ll call Cities and the City of God. 

I intend it pastorally, to help you as you keep track of what’s happening in cities in America and elsewhere. I prefer to take my news a week at a time, not minute by minute. It’s not information overload we suffer from but rather what sensory neurobiology calls “filter failure.” A surplus of input makes it hard for us to discern genuine information, to distinguish signal from noise. We can’t sift and sort and bring order to all the stuff assaulting us on our laptops, iPads, and 65” OLEDs. We need older stories, classics, for that.

“For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the palace of aliens is a city no more, it will never be rebuilt. Therefore strong people will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you . . .”

—Isaiah 25. 2 –3

In biblical literature the city is the invention of the line of Cain, an invention out of the apostate line, the ‘seed of the serpent’. That’s the worst possible lineage you can imagine. You might say, “That’s all I need to hear. Why bother!” The world’s first murderer was the inventor of the world’s first city. Cain invented it in the aftermath of his own sentence of judgment away from the presence of God. And so we see already intimated in biblical mythos the spiritual heritage of the city as a pagan or secular answer to Eden. The city is Cain’s answer to the paradise of God from which he’s been expelled.

St Augustine in the fifth century was alert to this spiritual message about the origin of the city and saw a remarkable parallel with respect to Rome the eternal city, the city which for half a millennium had represented civilization, order, stability, to people everywhere including Augustine over in Alexandria in north Africa. Augustine was living at the time and writing in the aftermath of the fall of Rome in 410 after a two-year siege in which the citizenry of Rome were reduced to cannibalism. Then the Goths and Alaric the king came into the city and for three days they murdered Rome’s inhabitants, terrorizing them, looting whatever treasures were left, burning the buildings. And the effect of the news of the sack of Rome can scarcely be overestimated.

The Christian Jerome in Jerusalem when he heard news of the fall of Rome cried out, “If Rome can perish, what can be safe!” It would be like turning on the evening news and seeing reports about how some enemy nation has taken Washington DC. The capital building is now held by enemy soldiers and so on. Even if we feel at some political remove from Washington you can imagine how unsettling that kind of news would be. We would wonder, “What’s next? What will become of civilization?” We got a tinge of that nearly 19 years ago.

As Isaiah did in chapter 25, Augustine responds to that crying anguished need of his contemporaries which included the refugees of Rome that had fled all the way to Alexandria and were now in his parish where he is writing his magnum opus The City of God. And echoing the story of the founding of the original city by the world’s first fratricide, he tells the story about the true spiritual nature of Rome. He reminds his readers of the legend of how Rome had been founded by Romulus after he murdered his twin brother Remus — Rome founded by a murderer who wanted to keep all the glory for himself and to eliminate the competition of this twin brother. And Augustine sees this as an apt symbol for the arrogance and savage thuggery that underlies not just Rome but every human civilization, the City of Man wherever it is to be found.

And starting from that debased beginning Augustine in his City of God records for us all the other evidence that right under the outward pomp and glory and architectural wonder of Rome lies a lethal swamp of moral and spiritual decadence beneath the surface. Here’s the real history of Rome. And so Augustine concludes: though God’s ways are inscrutable to us nevertheless if God allowed Rome to fall it was surely not an act of injustice that God in his temporal judgment had allowed this city finally to reap what it had sown.

But Augustine knew that this was not the whole story of cities. Although this explained the fall of Rome, although it does justice to the city of Enoch first founded by Cain, it isn’t the whole story because God has another purpose with respect to cities that comes clear as you read through Genesis and the later books of the Bible, including the Book of Isaiah and the text that is our epigraph. The City of Man that begins with self-love God redemptively is going to turn around, God is going to launch a counter-offensive. More about that next time.

—PCE+

Decide What You Stand For

From Genesis: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. . . . God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“It takes all kinds to make a world.” I heard my Grandpa Jack say that time and again. They are the words I most remember him by. Today I want to speak of two Whites. First, Vicky. You know her as Victoria, the woman I get through the nights with and enter every new day beside. Vicky White was born in Brussels but grew up in the Congo. The daughter of American medical missionaries Muriel and Robert White, her father was, when they lived in Wembo-Nyama, the only physician in a 300-mile radius. 

In 1964 Chinese-Communist-inspired rebels were committing atrocities in the Congo. Whites were being shot on sight. Their skin wasn’t the ‘right’ color. American Embassy officials told all missionaries and their families to leave the area but said doctors could stay if they chose. The United States Army airlifted many families, including the Whites, out of country. The military cargo plane carrying them was so overloaded it clipped the tops of the trees at the end of the runway. Her father didn’t board the plane; he feared it wouldn’t clear those trees, and he had Congolese patients who were going to die if he abandoned them. For two months the family didn’t know whether Robert Bracken White was alive.

He made it. He made it to safety because of the compassion and bravery of the Congolese. Some were patients whose lives he’d saved; all of those who came to his aid decided to take a stand. They created an escape route out of the country. At one point the Congolese put their bodies between him and rebels who wanted to kill him because he was White. 

The other White is Kim. Kim White and I became friends because her husband, Dr Benjamin White, a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the U.S. Army, a West Point man, was my son’s ROTC commander in college. (Benny was a wide receiver for Army when they played in the Rose Bowl. Everything relates to football.) I don’t know better people or a better family than Kim and Ben and BJ and Logan. Here is Kim in her own words, writing on May 30th:

Keeping it real today.

I’ve been trying to write this post for the last few days, but every time I started writing, the tears started too and I was unable to see what I was writing so I would stop and promise to come back to it. Today, despite the tears, I’m committed to it.

As I write, my husband is sitting across from me, in our shared home office, writing down his own thoughts. He’s pounding away on the keyboard. I don’t know exactly what he is writing, but I know he is frustrated. I know he is sad and I know he is not ok.

As I write, our daughter is on a call with work colleagues. Her company has had a number of open conversations, via Zoom, to let their employees talk, share, and vent. During the past few weeks, she has shed many tears, probably more than me. She’s 24. She has an answer for every question put before her, except one: why is there still so much hate? I know she is frustrated. I know she is sad. I know she is not ok.

As I write, our son is out on a run. Yep, he came into the office and said, “I’m going for a run.” He’s a runner — he should be able to go for a run. Period. But at that moment, the three of us locked eyes, all thinking the same thing. He sees the fear in his parent’s eyes, and we see the fear in his. He kisses me on the cheek, dad says be safe and off he went. 

I have a pit in my stomach, but I remind myself — he knows the rules when he leaves the house. He’s 28. We’ve been over them a gazillion times. Stay on the main road. Keep your hands out of your pockets. Comply. Don’t talk back. We will deal with what we have to deal with after the fact…just come home alive. Our son is well aware that his Blackness makes some uneasy. He can’t bring himself to watch the videos... I know he is frustrated, I know he is sad and I know he is not ok.

As a mother of Black children, my journey has been and continues to be different than those who are not raising Black children. While our hopes and dreams may be similar, our fears when our kids walk out the door are not. I prayed for my kids to never feel the sting of racism but unfortunately that prayer wasn’t answered. They’ve spent countless nights in my arms as I held them and wiped away their tears and not because of a relationship gone bad but because someone called them the “N” word or monkey. 

As adults, they continue to share stories of injustices that they’ve personally experienced and those of their friends. I feel helpless. I am frustrated, I am sad and I am not ok.

I’m thankful that my children are back home with us during this pandemic. I can’t imagine them being alone in their respective apartments back east during this time of isolation. I’m thankful we are able to share in the day-to-day routine with each other. We’ve had mostly good days, but on our not so good days, we mourned the loss of our beloved dog, BeLo, the passing of one of Benny’s cousins due to the coronavirus, and the murders of three people none of us knew and yet each of us felt a connection to: Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. SAY THEIR NAMES.

As I write, I hear the door open. Our son is home. He’s breathing. He’s alive.

The killing of George Floyd has touched a nerve in our country. Peaceful protesting can lead to meaningful change in hearts, minds, and policies. Looting and rioting do not; they harm, and harm disproportionately, the people who need help.

What can you and I do to help? Much of what follows comes from Kim White.

  • Acknowledge the inequities in our country that disadvantage Black people.

    All lives matter of course, but we’re focused on Black lives now for the same reason the world, after 9/11, focused and said, We’re all Americans now.

  • Acknowledge and confront your racial biases. We all have them. 

  • Acknowledge and strongly believe that racism has no place in our community and our country.

  • Engage in conversations with people who don’t look like you.

  • Call out people/friends in your circle when they ‘joke’.

  • Be an ally.

    Be an ally the way the Congolese were who got Robert White to safety. Put your body on the line between Black people and racism. 

Finally: Don’t be afraid. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—and Japanese Americans.” (No, FDR didn’t say that exactly; I add the last part because his Executive Order 9066 forced the relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans. In California if you had as little as 1/16th Japanese lineage you were forced into internment camps. It was a racist thing to do.) Don’t be afraid to be uncomfortably honest, to straighten someone’s tie when necessary, including your own, to the glory of God. Don’t be afraid to be faithful. As Clayton Christensen used to say to his students at Harvard Business School, “Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”

“It takes all kinds to make a world.” In the name of the Holy Trinity who creates us all, every one of us, in the image of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“I believe because he fulfills none of my dreams, because he is in every respect the opposite of what he would be if I could have made him in my own image.”
— W. H. Auden, writing of his conviction that Jesus is Lord

Let us do this

On the 6th of June, 1944, this happened, or began to happen. On the left, the UK and Canada. On the right, the USA. Let’s do to racism what was done to Nazism, left and right working together to defeat an enemy not just common but chronic.

Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles

British statesman and member of the Conservative Party, Sir Robert Peel twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He is regarded as the father of the modern British police—known as “bobbies” after Robert to this day—and indirectly as a model for modern police forces in all non-authoritarian states.

His Nine Principles:

  • The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

  • The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.

  • Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.

  • The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.

  • Police seek and preserve public favor not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.

  • Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.

  • Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

  • Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.

  • The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

Faith in exile

We are futural creatures. We’re used to making sense of our lives by memory, but if we didn’t know it already this pandemic has revealed how much we make sense of them in anticipation. We live for the person we hope to become. We look forward to who we will be some time from now and we landmark the transitions with rites and ceremonies celebrated in public co-located with loved ones and friends. 

I just learned the word co-located via the virtual commencement we connected to Thursday morning with our son Gabriel. Had it not been for the pandemic, he, Victoria, and I would be vacationing in Janice Dalzell-Piper’s beautiful Ireland now, having hopped a red-eye Thursday night after a luncheon for Baker Scholars and their parents and commencement ceremonies all day at Harvard Business School. That luncheon and the rest of it would have been an occasion to recognize his accomplishment and to thank his mentors. To lose it was disappointing, for Gabriel, for Victoria, and fer sher for me!

I think of other parents in the parish whose children are graduating from schools. Notre Dame—Victoria went to graduate school there, my son-in-law is a doctoral student there and one of our high school students, Sam Abbott, will be a freshman this fall—announced the other day that it’s going to start school two weeks early and end the fall term at Thanksgiving break. Other students, entering or returning in schools all over the country, are still wondering whether in-class courses will be offered or not. If your children can’t be on campus this fall, are they going to take a gap year or defer, or not? What’s that going to look like? Who are they going to be if they can’t be where they’re supposed to be?

Pandemic dislocation is hard. It’s hard on students. And I can tell you on good authority it’s hard on parents. All of us with children in school were looking forward to parading through all these rites of passage with our students and now we’re unable to do that except virtually. And whether the ceremony is on the banks of the Charles River or on the island of Belvedere virtually is not the same as co-located. We’re not receiving the graduation, we’re not getting the college orientation or the first parents weekend or the special lunch. We’re not receiving the Sacrament by mouth where it belongs. (The Hebrew word nephesh which comes into English as ‘soul’ means throat.) It’s lamentable, life in exile. We live life bodily; we were made to; and now we seem disembodied. 

Seventy-five years ago this month, the United States, having been provoked to war by Japan, made a moonscape of Yokohama with incendiary bombs. Uncle Sam had let my Tamaoki ancestors and everyone else in the city know that the bombing was coming in two weeks so please leave the city. They did, evacuating to the north. My mother’s most oft-repeated memory of that time in exile is of a Korean girl who befriended her in Hokkaido. A Japanese girl would take Akiko’s lunch from her every day, and a Korean girl would generously split hers with her. When my grandfather Yoshiharu came out of the bomb shelter in Yokohama it took him seven whole days to find his way home. The landmarks he would have depended on to find it were gone. 

Rites and ceremonies, liturgies, are the landmarks by which we find our way to the person and the people, the community, we hope to be. The rites and ceremonies include everything from ‘Play Ball!’ to a luncheon to a cap and gown to turning a tassel to gathering at an altar in a sacred space. 

Last Sunday in the sermon I said that the Bible, that wondrous and weird library of books, is looking a lot less strange in the time of pandemic. Most of the prayers in the Psalms are laments, and that’s in part because many of the people walking around in the Bible’s pages were living in exile. And we can relate to that now in a way that we couldn’t before this pandemic. We’re living in a forced exile. The prophet Isaiah wrote in exile. What does the Spirit of the Lord say to God’s people in exile? “Come to me, all you that are thirsty.” [Isa. 55. 1]

After Nebuchadnezzar II’s siege of Jerusalem in 597 BC, residents of Judah were deported to Babylon where they were held captive for fifty-eight years. Psalm 40 was written in exile. Psalm 137 was also, a song that expresses the longing of the Jewish people during their Babylonian exile. We had no idea when we said in January that the word chosen for 2020 was ‘Longing’ what that would mean.

Psalm 137 is a nine-verse poem. Tradition attributes it to the prophet Jeremiah. In exile our ancestors in the faith lost their way of life. And what they missed above all was Jerusalem because that’s where the Temple was. They located themselves, were co-located, with the God who promised to be present to them there. How were they going to worship the Lord in a strange land? 

That question has become our question. How do we worship the Lord in a strange land? So hear now what God said through Jeremiah the prophet, in Jeremiah 29, “This is what the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, ‘Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters, find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. And seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I’ve carried you into exile.’”

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Pray for the peace of Babylon, the Lord says. Pray for Wuhan, Milan, London, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Belvedere. Seek the peace of the city to which I’ve carried you into exile. 

There are a lot of false choices in life. We’re encountering two. I’ve heard some clergy say that the church is not a building, that the sacred space doesn’t matter. This implies that faith is merely what someone does with their solitude. What’s more, buildings have ministries. They matter as any architect knows. They are physical reminders of a vital dimension to life that modernity has tried to marginalize or show the door. Ours has such a ministry. It says, Keep Looking Up. And our Christus Rex says, Come To Me. 

I’ve also heard other clergy saying that they and their congregations must be allowed back into their sacred spaces straightaway to worship the Lord. The problem here is that there are thoroughly comprehensible reasons for dislocation, however disturbing and devastating it is. And this is not the first time God’s people have been called to live faithfully in exile.

We are learning many things in this pandemic. And we are longing for the day when our buildings will function within our society as they were designed and consecrated to do.

In exile irony is everywhere. Psalm 137 is a song about being unable to sing a song. Exile forces upon us disciplines of sorrow. That’s the school in which we’re currently enrolled, the school of lament, lamenting that we can’t lament in the way that we want to. But we’re doing what the faithful in exile are called to do; we’re seeking the welfare of the city. We are settling down, to borrow Jeremiah’s language, into this strange regime seeking the welfare of the city where we are, the welfare of our neighbors. But we have no desire to remain in exile. We are not where we want to be, dislocated from our sacred spaces. We have not forgotten Jerusalem. And we long to return there.

—PCE+

'40', U2

Psalm 40 was written in exile. That’s what we’ve been in virtually, when our churches were closed for public in-person services, since 15th March. My son Evan was at this concert, standing in the mosh pit below Bono as the music started. Pray for Jerusalem; pray for Wuhan, Chicago, Milan, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Belvedere.