Monday, October 6, 2025
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Pronto pup
Take your worries and convert them into prayer. Take your fear and connect it with God’s fear. Take your depression and see it in the presence of God’s dying on the cross. Bring it to the Presence who has suffered all and lived it all. You will discover that in the presence of Jesus you can live beyond pain and joy, sadness and gladness. When you pray, you connect your life with God’s life. You live in a new way. – Henri Nouwen
God is everywhere, and at the Illinois State Fair in August, the Minnesota State Fair in September and the Texas State Fair in October He might not evident in the spirit, but He’s there in the flesh (I use that phrase with a grain of salt). Garrison Keillor, a native Minnesotan loves his fair and I love my Illinois State Fair, and I have plenty of Texas friends who love their fair, and Big Tex presiding in the shadow of the Cotton Bowl.
I can’t leave the autumn to just the burning red leaves and cool mornings that morph into warm sunny afternoons. There is so much more … the cows, for example, also need a little press – the Holsteins and the Longhorns and the rest. So I hope you enjoy this longish excerpt from Garrison’s column from a few weeks ago: Garrison Keillor, “Wishing I had me a Pronto Pup.”
I feel a little sad and sort of disenfranchised in September heading for October and for the fourth year in a row having missed the Minnesota State Fair and not eaten Pronto Pups or cheese curds or hot buttered corn on the cob. I am a Minnesotan, though I live in New York, and as such am sensible, wary of excess, and the Fair is our annual Feast Of Things You’ve Been Warned Against. We go see the livestock barns, the various gaudy breeds of poultry, bins of grains and vegetables in the Horticulture Building, watch the horse judging, but while walking the grounds we pick up our favorite forbidden foods, all of them portable. Walking gives us privacy and also aids in digestion.
The Fair is also one time when we’re all together in one place, the anti-vaxxers and the p.c. police, the radical Marxists, the Flat Earthers, the Apocalyptic Baptists, and so far nobody has suggested that Pronto Pups contain an enzyme that will make you accept the Establishment version of the news.
The Fair was created by farm organizations as a gathering of farmers and their families, to see the latest machinery and learn about innovations and compete for blue ribbons and also to connect with each other and have a good time. The prosperous grain farmers of western Minnesota and the big poultry and hog and beef producers and also my people, the marginal 150-acre dairy farmers who raised feed for the cattle and a few chickens for eggs and a vegetable garden to feed the family. Holstein cows were a generous animal who enabled hardworking families to wrest a living from hilly, rocky land no good for big crops. As a boy, visiting the farm, I sensed not much delight in the lives of Holsteins. They knew they were not kept around because the farmer loved them. Horses had names, Brownie, Pete, Prince, and cows didn’t, same as your lawnmower didn’t or the hand pump.
My generation rebelled against the farm life and sought freedom to be carefree, maybe wild. We wrote poetry. We imagined becoming interesting individuals. We were ready for rock ’n’ roll to shake our nerves and rattle our brain, break our will but what a thrill, great balls of fire. But Jerry Lee Lewis wouldn’t have been tolerated back in hard times with people going hungry. We thought it was rebellious but really it was the product of prosperity created by hardworking farmers and gardeners.
So I went to the Fair for the Pronto Pup and the cheese curds but also to walk around the barns and mingle with farmers — you could pretty well distinguish them from the accountants and schoolteachers — and take deep breaths of farm smells and think about my ancestors, like my grandpa James Keillor, an old man bundled up on a bitter cold day in 1925, pitchfork in hand, grinning. Ah, the pleasure of working hard outdoors.
The texts in this week’s lectionary come from Jonah, the story of a hard-working prophet waylaid by Yahweh and instructed to preach to the heathen in Nineveh, something he absolutely at first refused to do. I can imagine being a campus minister (which I was, actually) taking students from the University of Illinois to the State Fair to “witness” to passers-by, and I imagine the resistance I’d feel within myself and the kids – spoken and unspoken,- listening to the tiny angel and tiny demon perched on their shoulders … who you gonna listen to? Jonah had those hanging on his shoulders too.
Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and preach against it;
their wickedness has come up before me.
But Jonah made ready to flee to Tarshish away from the LORD.
He went down to Joppa, found a ship going to Tarshish,
paid the fare, and went aboard.
Nothing went well for Jonah when he fled in the opposite direction from Nineveh. A tempest arose and swamped his ship.
Pick me up and throw me into the sea,
that it may quiet down for you;
since I know it is because of me
that this violent storm has come upon you.
As you probably know there is more to the story, and it’s a great story. But Jonah’s stubborn spirit does him no favors, just you wait and see.
Jesus spun his parable of the Good Samaritan from Jonah’s example, or he might have.
Who was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?
“The one who treated him with mercy.”
Just so. Now you go and do likewise.
With all those thousands of pilgrims surrounding Big Tex, I know there are many who need the touch of Jesus. I imagine there are folks from churches and colleges there sharing their own Gospel stories.
Once you get a taste of this, it’s something like a Pronto Pup, and you can never get enough.
You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your being,
with all your strength,
and with all your mind,
and your neighbor as yourself.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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