“Why Am I Still A Christian?”

The Advent season, with its glitter and good tidings, has a dark side. The promised one who will loosen the stranglehold of death has not yet come. “In 2025,” writes Ricky Hayes in his spiritual autobiography, “the headlines have been littered with assassinations and murders. I didn’t know the victims, but I know they didn’t deserve it. That’s the sickening part about Death: it doesn’t discriminate, it doesn’t ask, it doesn’t care. All it does is take.”

Hayes, born and raised in Chico, found Death “would pop up again and again—sometimes as a shadow in the corner of my room, sometimes in hospital corridors, sometimes in the faces of people I loved.” So, he asks, why did God “let me carry this fear like an uninvited passenger for my entire life?”

Hayes explores that question (and many more) in “Why Am I Still A Christian?” ($13.99 in paperback from Publishers Brew, publishersbrew.com; also for Amazon Kindle). The story is “messy, it’s raw, it’s sometimes irreverent, but it’s real.”

The first half of the book is Hayes’ spiritual odyssey, and it’s messy indeed. “It’s about how grief, doubt, porn, legalism, cult-like religion, and plain old despair nearly convinced me to leave Christianity behind. But it’s also about how, through all that chaos, Jesus kept showing up. Not the Jesus of fire insurance, shame, and performance, but the Jesus who refuses to let go, even when you’re screaming at Him.”

The second half focuses on specific theological issues, with a biting critique of the modern American church which all too often, Hayes writes, suggests “salvation depends on our performance instead of Christ’s finished work.” In fact, “what I have learned most of my life from Christians, both Fundamentalist and Charismatic, is how not be be a Christian…. We’re supposed to influence people to be reconciled to God by loving one another, not by fighting a cultural war.”

The promise has been fulfilled: “The cross is about God revealing the greatest love one can give through the light of the world, Jesus Christ. Whatever blackness hinders our souls from seeing his beauty, God will shine through if we desire him to do so.”

“Core Samples: Poems”

“On the New Year,” writes Chico poet (and retired Butte College instructor) Phillip Hemenway, “the day/ standing sharp and clear/ in invitation to a California/ walk despite the glassy wind/ nipping hard from the north,/ we succumbed, the dog and I,/ to a basal need for motion,/ and from the road’s edge I saw,/ back among bare walnut trees,/ the swoop and slash of blue toes,/ a girl in her rope swing, flying/ barefoot in wide flashing arcs/ as she broke winter’s first law,/ her radiant joy the purest/ of all potions against the cold.”

But before the new year, the poet takes stock, looking decades back, here in “Core Samples: Poems” ($15 in hardcover, self-published, available at The Bookstore in downtown Chico and MONCA, the Museum of Northern California Art).

A trip to San Diego Zoo (seeing “the muscles flow like liquids through/ those tiger-black stripes”), a train ride across the country (“There is no snow/ this year there is/ no snow in Colorado”), a trip to Viet Nam (in Hanoi, a Brit “tells us over/ beer in the Metropole bar/ ‘Figure anyone here who ain’t/ working is watching’”). And there’s a gallimaufry of miscellaneous poems.

Death haunts many of the poems, such as in the sonnet sequence about the stuff left behind after the death of the poet’s grandfather Merle in 1985. And the Vietnam Memorial: “I must claim my war the one/ I did not choose to fight in….// I sing of Disobedience/ of Mom and Pop’s shame/ of all the dead ones you know/ that bullets gave a name// Where agent Orange and FBI/ stand cheek by jowl with CREEP/ A big black wall in Washington/ where the living go to weep.”

“All of us are fatally human,” the poet says elsewhere. “We must never rush out to prove it.” 

Does the poet’s walk foreshadow the future?

“And so at some distant New Year,/ I will walk all the dogs I’ve ever known,/ I will step out of my ancient shoes,/ I will find a rope swing and work myself/ into a spectacular blue-toed arc,/ and on the apogee of a January One,/ I will howl once and expand forever.”

“Father And Son: The Hitler Loyalist And The US Airman”

Mary Jensen, a “recovering grants writer” and Chico State Professor Emerita, told the story of her marriage in “Rudy’s Rules For Travel: Life Lessons From Around The Globe.” Her late husband had flown US Air Force bombing missions over his homeland in Germany.

In 1999, faced with difficult medical news, they became caregivers for each other, Rudy writing his long-delayed memoir and Mary acting as editor. “Rudy wrote quite unceasingly,” Mary recalls, “easily capturing the perspectives and voices of himself as toddler, adolescent, and young man, as each took his turn living with Papa.” 

The beautifully crafted story is told in “Father And Son: The Hitler Loyalist And The US Airman” ($16.95 in paperback from Astoria Books; also for Amazon Kindle) by Rudy Jensen with Mary K. Jensen. 

“Papa was 100 percent Danish but a German loyalist,” Rudy writes, “who had moved heaven and earth (and a pregnant wife) to have his son born a German citizen.” Born May 17, 1921 in Hamburg to Papa’s wife, Francisca, Rudy lost his birth mother to gallbladder disease just after turning two.

Papa (a seafarer) and Rudy settled in Washington, DC; eventually there was a new “Mutti” (“‘Mutti’ is a German endearment, much as ‘Mommy’ is in English”), Anna Weber, “a southern German whose family had been deeply scarred by World War I.” Papa became a waiter at the fancy Willard Hotel restaurant, which catered to official Washington, and there he met J. Edgar Hoover and the two became friends.

Rudy wanted to become an American citizen and Papa was adamant that the German occupation of France was “positive progress” (it took a long time for Papa to accept the truth). With American’s entry into the war in 1941, “overnight the entire Jensen family became designated ‘Enemy Aliens.’”

“War does strange things,” Rudy writes; in 1943 he began “a 27-month journey … being drafted into the American Army Air Force, not only as a German citizen, but also as an Enemy Alien.” (He soon became an American citizen.) The bombing missions he describes are deeply poignant. 

And yet Rudy survived. His subsequent decades with Mary testify to an extraordinary life.

“Rancho del Llano Seco: Northern California’s Last Rancho, Butte County, California”

“Rancho Llano Seco … is a historical 17,767-acre multi-purpose family ranch located in southwestern Butte County … ten miles southwest of Chico. The property is bounded by Ord Ferry Road to the north, 7 Mile Lane to the east, the Butte/Glenn County line to the south, and the Sacramento River to the west.”

While the physical location of the Rancho is clear, the location of documents regarding its history was not; material in “local museums and archives” proved elusive. Then the manager of the Rancho, which is private property, pointed researchers to Rancho Headquarters on Hugh Baber Drive. 

Here there were “tons of documents stored in archive boxes, in original magazine files, on wood shelves and in steel bins, along with photographs, aerial photos, communications and maps covering” (from 1874 to modern times) the almost 3000-acre “riparian and flood plain restoration project” within the Rancho started in 2019 by The Nature Conservancy.

The archeological and historical report produced for the project, now beautifully edited with dozens of digitized historical images and maps, is available through ANCHR, the Association for Northern California Historical Research (anchr.org) located in Chico. “Rancho del Llano Seco: Northern California’s Last Rancho, Butte County, California” ($19.95 in paperback) is from Gregory White (Archeology and Paleontology, Sub Terra Consulting) along with B. Arlene Ward (Mechoopda Tribe of Chico Rancheria) and Adrian Frediani (The Nature Conservancy).

Sections cover the natural environment, Native American cultures, and the history and ownership of Rancho del Llano Seco. In 1870 John Parrott completed ownership of the ranch, and his descendants “still own and continue to steward the land to this day.” 

One of the previous owners, Sebastian Keyser, who claimed the ranch in 1843, is of special interest as his path crossed the history of John Sutter and John Bidwell.

Keyser “apparently took part in the Bear Flag revolt of 1846, where he lost part of his left hand in a munitions accident.” He lost his wife in divorce and in 1847 notified newspaper readers that “he will not be accountable for any debts of her contracting….”

Readers today are in debt for this careful illumination of local history.