JOHN HANSEN, MY BROTHER

When I was seven-years-old I fell from the crossbar on our swing set. My brother, John, heard me crying and ran down the hill to my rescue. He scooped me up and carried me to the house, laying me on the brown Herculon couch in our living room. He gently positioned my poor broken arm on a pillow and tucked another pillow under my head, reassuring me until our mom got home. That was the first of three broken arms for me, evidence of my inherent gift for agility and coordination.

When I was eight years old John stood in holy waters and baptized me a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was the only one in our family with the authority to do such a thing, and though he would choose to walk a path that did not include organized religion, his gift to me stuck, and has been pivotal in all that is dear to me. 

When our brother George was three or four-years-old he got his hand stuck in a scorching hot Ironrite. The rollers on the machine melted away the flesh on his little hand. Our brother John heard his cries and rushed into the room, released the safety bar on the machine, and called for our mother. George almost lost that hand, but thanks to a dutiful doctor the skin transplants took and he is able to do all sorts of magic with that scarred hand.

When I was nine-years-old I stood paralyzed with fear in the corner of our kitchen in Pleasant Hills PA as my drunken father came at my mother with a knife in his fist. Out of nowhere my older brother John appeared with a baseball bat, planting himself between my father and our mother. He raised the bat and glared at my father. “You will not touch her.” He and my father stared each other down until my father retrieved and left the house. 

Years before, when that same father had thrown our mother down the stairs in a fit of rage, before I was born, John went to live with our Aunt Mary and Uncle Archie on their ranch in Blackfoot, Idaho. Mary and Archie were never able to have children. Mom had suffered a clot to the heart and to the lungs and was not expected to live. Aunt Mary and Uncle Archie loved John, and wanted more than anything to have him for their own. But mom survived, and healed, and though Archie and Mary asked if they could keep him as their own, our mom could not give him up. A painful sort of release happened then, I believe, and their “ownership” of my brother shifted, which no doubt confused the tender heart of that young boy

John didn't get much of a chance to be a kid.

Today my big brother John enters a new decade of his life here on earth. I look at the white haired man and still see the spark of love in the eyes of the teenager who rescued me from the ground under the swing set - who facilitated my religious desires - who saved the hand of our brother - who held the reigns of Uncle Archie's horses with assurance that they would always be his, but then weren’t. And I ponder with awe and love the scene replayed in my head of my own father trying to injure our mother, intercepted by a boy with a baseball bat. Baseball bats should be swung with joy and passion on grassy ball fields. No boy should have to hold a bat in that way. 

John's hands hold gentler things.

Today I think with love and gratitude of my brother, John Hansen, the wounded warrior who rescued, in spite of his own wounds, over and over again.

Legendary icon Rosalie Sorrells loved and cherished John.
And he loved and cherished her.

He even rescued me from playing the G chord incorrectly. “Are you kidding?” I said when he told me I should change the way I was playing that basic guitar chord. “That’s a ridiculous way to play a G. My pinkie finger  isn’t strong enough, and my double jointed fingers click in and out when I try to play it that way.”

“Trust me” he said. “Watch real guitar players, at least the ones who play on stage.” Sure enough, he was right. And though I grumbled about it, I changed the way I play that G chord. And the change freed up two fingers that were able to manipulate strings with counter melodies and sustain chords. A goodly portion of the songs I have written use the free’d up fingers in that new positioning.

 

I’ve found comfort all my life in the sound of the name John. So much so that we named our firstborn son John. If you are a little girl, straddled by two little-girl-sisters, it’s a comforting thing to have a big brother named John, just old enough to seem heroic, even if he himself didn’t feel that way.

John and his old friend, Steve Eaton
play at his birthday party yesterday.
John's best loved guitars have plenty of scars.

John and Steve in bygone days.

My big brother is not without scars. In fact, he is no doubt  as scarred as our bother George’s hand. But in spite of it, he uses himself for good, planting himself, even quivering with fear that no one but him knows is there, between the great unknown and the people he loves. 

John plays with his grandkids.

He’ll be the first to tell you that he is a mess. That’s part of his charm. But we who claim the same mother, and the same distorted history … we embrace that mess. We own that mess together. And together is such a good place to be.

John's girlfriend, Garnette Edwards, threw him
the most remarkable party for his birthday yesterday!
 Hundreds of people attended. What a beautiful bash it was!

John and Garnette. 

Happy birthday, brother-o’-my-heart.

My brother and me.

John Hansen, Belinda Bowler and Rich Brotherton

See that tall guy in the pink shirt on the front page
of the Idaho Statesman paper? The solitary male among a
sea of women marching for women's rights?
Yup, that's him.

John's first band; Hard Luck and Trouble, circa 1971.
That's John in the front middle.

My brothers, John and George Hansen

We are John's biggest fans!
(and also the most obnoxious)

From an ad for the Famous Motel Cowboys Reunion Concert

3-20-19 FOREVER (Psalm 23 part V) End of Lent

In the long-ago days of my childhood, when a show came on TV you had to stop everything in order to watch it. Kids finished up their play and their chores, rushing back home in time for Gilligan’s Island. There was something unifying in the communal pause. Netflix, DVR, Tevo and VHS recordings changed all that. We’re all on our own now.

Easter weekend we and every other Judeo-Christian family clustered around the TV at exactly 7 pm to watch The Ten Commandments or the Greatest Story Ever Told. Either one was essentially a date with Charlton Heston. 

Moses in The Ten Commandments

John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told

The movies recount in Technicolor the events of the Bible; the Ten Commandments telling the story of Moses and The Greatest Story Ever Told interpreting the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.  Both shows fit in that particular weekend because the Christian Easter holiday often falls in the calendar at the same time as Jewish Passover. It’s no coincidence that they often fall at the same time, relative to the Paschal moon. It’s central in the divine design. 

My friend Carla and I recently began attending a religion class on Wednesday mornings, sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our instructor is not only an awesome teacher, he is also a well-grounded scholar of ancient and modern scripture. This year he’s been discussing the four Gospels of Christ. Lately we’ve studied the Temple of Solomon, and we’ve discussed the parable of the Vine. We have visited the upper-room where Jesus and his apostles received what is now known as the Last Supper. It’s been a powerful and wonderful thing to have this Wednesday morning feast with Jack Helgesen and a couple hundred other students.

Search for Virtual New Testament in your app store. It's free.

There’s a free phone app called Virtual New Testament that shows the layout of the Temple of Solomon, among other things (created by BYU). I can pretend I am actually walking there. I imagine being in the marketplace outside the temple, and in the Women’s Court, and the Holy of Holies, and I imagine seeing the veil rent in twain at that particular moment when Jesus died. It’s awesome for me, because I never outgrew pretending.

I can visit the altar where animals were sacrificed. It takes me to a place where I am either a priest sacrificing, or I am a believer, bringing a lamb.

Jack the teacher told us that on the day Jesus died, in the city of Jerusalem, there would have been 256,000 lambs sacrificed at the holy altar of the temple. (reference is Jesus the Christ, pg.162) It’s simple math, multiplying the number of families living there at the time and the pilgrims coming to the holy city for the holy day. That’s a lot of lambs! This is high season for shepherds.The marketplace surrounding the temple must have had a mighty chorus of bleating lambs!  And since I am in the mode of pretending I am a lamb and a shepherd this week, it’s a pivotal time. I am thinking about the delicate balance it would take to be a good shepherd. I love and own my sheep. But they are also my business. I make my living by selling my sheep. I sustain my own life by eating my wares. An attempt to reconcile protecting the life of my lambs in order to sell them into death is the crux of Easter to me this year. (Pretending can be just so exhausting.)

He is both perfect lamb and good shepherd.

When I think about Jesus being the Good Shepherd I find it perfectly fitting. He loves us, perfectly. But we are also his business. And this is why he fulfills his task in the Garden of Gethsemane, accepting every ounce of our sins and sorrows, our illnesses, our weaknesses. He lifts our dirty feet at the doorstep of our mutual Father’s mansion and cleans them with the drops of blood shed in that moment of divine atonement. He labors away, like our mothers did in giving us birth, hinged on the hope of what would come of it. As powerful as he was, it had to have been so awful for him, or he would not have asked his father to remove this cup from him if there were any other way to get the work done. And, of course, we know now that this was the way.

I’ve read scholarly explanations about how the various cups of that last evening of the Savior’s life allude to the four cups of the Passover Sader, the Passover supper that had been revisited since the time of Moses. This last cup Jesus held up, just as he had at the supper table. He was willing to drink from it for the sake of his Lambs, who laid unawares on the altar of sacrifice.

We refer to Jesus as the sacrificial Lamb, and we are correct. While the blood of hundreds of thousands of unblemished lambs spilled onto the temple floor, Jesus himself hung on the cross that first Good Friday.

But he is also the Good Shepherd, and because of his sacrifice, no longer would lambs need to lose their lives on the altars of the Lord. His own sacrifice ended the law of sacrifice, replacing it with the law of Love and consecration.

We are His sheep. He has earned us, and he owns us. Otherwise, we would all be goners. 

I imagine myself as a new lamb, born in the Spring of that holy year, sold to a law abiding family, waiting in line for my turn at the altar. But the skies grow dark, and the earth shakes as the Maker of the earth himself gives up the ghost, his own blood spilling over the earth like a sacrament. In that monumental sacrifice, the law is changed, and I am no longer needed at the altar, He bought my life. I am purchased, and set free.

As I gather my final thoughts, turning the page of this year’s exercise in writing for each day of Lent, I turn to the last words of King David in the 23^rdPsalm:

I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Because he has purchased me, and called me his own, I hold in my virtual pocket an invitation to come Home. The date is written in invisible ink. He knows it, but I don't. I have green meadows to romp in yet, and other sheep to live among for a season. But when the moment comes and I am released from my flesh, I have unbridled hope in the notion of returning to a place I once knew as home. 

There is relatively little that I know for a surety. It’s all hope. But I will be surprised beyond imagination if, when I die, I am not brought to a place that feels familiar, to a light that feels familiar, and to people I know and love. I will know then, as I know now, that my capacity to be there is facilitated by my Shepherd, whose own sacrifice released me from the altar of permanent death. He has saved me from myself, and I am forever in his house and in his debt. I can never repay him. That’s how it should be.

But I can love him. I can love him according to his definition of love, which is the truest way to love:

If ye love me, keep my commandments.

It’s no more complicated than that.

4-19-19 MERCY (Psalm 23 part IV)

I didn’t mean to do it. It was never my intention. It just happened.

Spring came with its warm rain and churned up the earth. Color, and breeze, and blossoms and dirt. My winter-worn lump of a body could not resist stepping out into it, breathing into the withered part of my lower lungs new air scented with new earth. But the going out got my feet dirty, so when I came back in, so did the dirt.

I knew when I entered that I was in trouble. Evidence followed me everywhere, smears of earth all over Father’s freshly mopped floor. I tried to retrace my steps with a damp cloth, but the dirt smeared in circles, making matters worse. Down there on my knees, trying to clean up my mess, I silently yelled at myself; “You should have known better! What were you thinking? You should never have left the house! Now look what you’ve brought in!”

But earth was so inviting. And it was Spring.

Soon my father and mother would return and would see their house changed and… I knew the shimmer of that place could not be diminished…and I knew what that meant for me and the mess I had made. I knelt on the floor, my knees sore and back aching, unable to remove the dirt. Bleach, and cloth, and tears could not remove it. I sunk into a heap of sorrow there on the floor. 

And then I heard it. 

I heard the familiar creak of the back door. I knew that sound. As a small child it comforted me, because I knew when I heard it that my big brother was home. 

He must have heard me weeping.

I felt his hand on my back, easing himself down to my level. Without a sound he knelt before me, lifting my chin, wiping my tears with a soft blue apron he had tied around his waist. And then, while I wept, he took that apron, damp with my own tears, and he swept it across Father’s floor. I shifted my weight and slid back against the wall, watching him. In the swift, arching motion of his mercy he cleaned up my mess. Sparkling clean. And then he left. 

I crouched there, staring at the clean floor, and then at my muddy feet, knowing the second I moved the floor would be dirty again. The hopelessness overwhelmed me and I sobbed, burying my head in my knees. 

And then he touched me again. 

He lifted one of my feet, and then the other, freeing my leg from the grip of my hands around my knees.  His head bowed before me, his strong shoulders bent downward, his hands moved swiftly but gently. A wide brimmed basin he had placed on the floor between us. One after the other, he washed my filthy feet. Drying them with the same apron he pulled from his waist, he whispered reassurances to me in a language I once knew, but had long forgotten. His voice was like a lullaby.

When he was finished, he smiled. He smiled, and nodded, asking me to stand. I stood, as he had asked, but emotion overcame me and I fell against his chest, my arms around his neck, my lips tucked into his cheek. I kissed him. Over and over I kissed him until he began to laugh. He eased me away from him. There we stood, side by side, in our father’s beautiful clean house. And then, with his hand held out, he pointed the way. I walked toward the kitchen, mother’s warm and blessed kitchen where all my childhood we had feasted. I did not need to look back. I knew he followed.

Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

4-18-19 SHEEP III (Psalm 23 part III)

Thou prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:

A watchful shepherd will carefully lead his flock to a place where the grasses are green and healthy. Poisonous plants have destroyed whole flocks. Sheep cannot determine by instinct what foods are good for them and which are dangerous. The figurative "table" represents a shepherd checking out what may be eaten buy his sheep. The shepherd will also keep an eye out for dangerous snakes and other enemies who may take advantage of grazing sheep.

Thou anointest my head with oil:

In the heat of the summer, nasal flies torment sheep. The pests buzz around trying to lay their eggs on a sheep's wet nose. When the eggs hatch into worms they burrow up the nose and cause terrible irritation. Sheep will stomp their feet and shake their heads frantically, trying to rid themselves of the bugs. A good shepherd will stroke his sheep and pour oil on his nose to keep the flies away and protect against their harmful behavior.  Then the sheep can feed comfortably and quietly again.

My cup runneth over:

At the end of a day the shepherd of a small flock will fill a large low rimmed bowl with fresh water. He will place the bowl in his lap. One by one the sheep will come to drink out of the bowl. As the animal drinks, the shepherd is able to closely examine his lambs for cuts or burrs, scratches or fevers. He will fill the bowl over and over until the lamb has had enough and can settle down for the night.

My story goes like this: I am a lamb and the Lord is my Shepherd. He makes me lie down in green pastures, then he leads me to still waters. When I fall over by the water, he restores me back to my legs. We then walk down a narrow pathway between fields. He keeps me focused so I don't stray, so no one else can claim to own me. I have his name attached to mine.  Pretty soon we come to  deep dark valley, but I don't fear it, because he is with me. His rod and his staff are a comfort to me, because I know he will protect me with them. Wherever we end up, he makes sure I have the best food available. He does all this even when my enemies are around. At the end of the day he calls me to him and sits down with a large bowl of water. He cleans me and puts oil on my head and ears and nostrils to keep flies from boring into me. He checks for wounds and fevers while I drink from the overflowing bowl.

That's my storyline, so I can remember the order of things.

OK, I'm now going to try to remember how it goes:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures

He leadeth me beside the still waters

He restoreth my soul

He leadeth me in  the path of righteousness for his name's sake

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Thou anoints my head with oil.

My cup runneth over.

I am reminded of the Savior intervening in the stoning of an adulteress. He walks between a pitiful individual and her enemies. Just the intervention had to have been nourishment to her empty sense of self. The willingness of "the shepherd" to set  a feast before someone others consider unworthy is representative of the Lord being "no respecter of persons".  

When I put myself in her shoes the words "in the presence of mine enemies" cinch it for me. He makes no apologies for the love He has for me. The doesn't love me with conditions. He doesn't love me "in spite of myself". He doesn't care what other people think of me, or for that matter, what they think of him for caring about me. He just loves me.

He just loves me.

What lamb would not want that kind of shepherd?

4-17-19 SHEEP (Psalm 23 Part II)

(continued from 4-16-19 post)

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.

Dark valleys, steep precipices, unknown places; these are frightening not only to timid sheep, but to humans as well. When sheep are directed to enter such places they will resist unless their shepherd encourages them with a calm voice. If a shepherd shouts the sheep will not obey.  A good shepherd reassures his flock that he is with them always, that he knows the way, and they can trust him to not leave them. 

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Shepherds carry with them two simple tools: a staff that has on it either a large hooped crook used to collect a sheep around the neck, or a small bent crook used to grab them by the legs. Staffs keep sheep from going astray, and draw them close to the shepherd.

leg staff

A rod is a club shaped piece of wood, like a small baseball bat, used to throw at other animals that might harm the sheep. 

One tool is used for offense, to restrain a wayward lamb. The other is used for defense, to protect sheep from harmful intruders.

Even if a shepherd never has to use either tool, knowing that he has the tools and is willing to use them provides comfort to the sheep.

The staff is also used to keep the shepherd stable in his own journey. He will use it to gently rub or scratch his sheep. These signs of affection calm the sheep and endear the shepherd to them.

 PSALM 23

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want

He maketh me to lie down in GREEN PASTURES

He leadeth me BESIDE THE STILL WATERS

He RESTORETH my soul

He leadeth me in the PATHS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS for HIS NAME’s sake.

Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the SHADOW OF DEATH, I will fear no evil, for thou are with me

Thy ROD and thy STAFF, they comfort me….

So far the story unfolds like this:

I’m a lamb, and the Lord is my Shepherd. I want for nothing more. He takes me to a green pasture, then to still waters. I fall over on the edge of the water. He restores me to my upright position. He then leads through a narrow passageway, making sure I stay on the path so no one else can claim me. We end up in a deep, dark valley, and though I would normally be SCARED TO DEATH, I’m not, because his rod and his staff comfort me and protect me.

In pondering how the Shepherd completely owns his sheep, dedicates himself to their care, and defends them against evil, I am reminded of a scene in the movie Schildler’s List. Oskar Schindler finds out the Jewish women who worked at his factory have been taken and loaded onto a cattle car. Oskar runs to the train station, only to find out that the train has already left for a concentration camp. He asks for their return. The Nazi commander tells him he can have another carload tomorrow, and the workers will be fresh. But Schindler insists on these specific women, who belong to the families of his workers. 

“You should not get stuck on names and lists”, the Nazi tells him. 

But Schindler insists: “These are mine! You cannot have them, they are mine!”

In the deepest part of me I hear my divine Advocate defending me, insisting, against the odds I have created for myself, that I cannot be taken. 

I am His. 

I cannot be replaced.

I have a name, and it is on His list.
And in that insistent declaration, I am undone.  

... for Thou are with me.