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lenten journal: report card

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I feel least like a teacher when I
turn in the grades and distill the
interactions with my students to
one single letter plus or minus

after weeks of asking them to
make their offerings take their chances
all too quickly all that matters is
one letter to somehow sum it up

to go on their permanent record
not the day we all laughed together
or we closed the books and sang out loud
conjunction junction what’s your function

I felt like a teacher on those days
this week I’m an accountant

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: an important slight change

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I’ve been mulling over one sentence that I carried away from the Evening with Garrison Keillor the other night. I remember much more of the evening, but his closing word on one story has stayed with me in a more disquieting way as I have wondered how to write about it. He told us about a woman he met when he left Minnesota as a young man and moved to New York City to become a writer. They fell in love and he imagined a wonderful and successful life far away from his roots. Then came the day when she challenged him to go back: “Write about what scares you most: that you will turn out just like them.” He returned to Minnesota and found his way to writing and talking about Lake Wobegon. As he finished the story he said, “I thank her for that important slight change in my life.”

Somewhere in my youth I first read the poem that begins:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

The losses mount up from there:

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

An important slight change. The place where that phrase has taken me the most is back to other words central in my Lenten journey, as I pray for forgiveness for the things I have done and the things I have left undone — the slight motions of my hands and heart as I both heal and hurt. The changes that matter often begin in incremental incidents.

I think on these things, and the movie Sliding Doors comes to mind. The film shows the two different lives a woman would have had all based on whether or not she beats the closing of the sliding doors on the subway. An important slight change.

The difference between important and slight is often difficult to discern. What seems enormous in one moment shrinks in perspective; what seems dispensable now grows into necessity in retrospect. The bottom line is life has no discards. Each word, each motion matters. The things we’ve done and the things we’ve left undone are each an important slight change. Life is important and slight in the same moment.

Perhaps the most tangible metaphor for me right now in understanding this idea is my weight. The lesson learned is I have to be mindful of every bite in order to lessen my presence on the planet (which is the goal). I don’t mean I have to totally deprive myself of everything that tastes good to me, yet I do have to remember what I have eaten both in quantity and quality and find a way to balance it out into a series of important small changes. If I can lose a pound a week, the small changes add up to an significant impact on both my blood pressure and my pant size. If I don’t attend to the things I eat and I don’t eat, I will shorten my life even as I widen my shadow.

I know that’s somewhat elementary, yet the physicality of my daily food choices remind me of the spirituality of my choices in general. When Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken,” he did so with a strong sense of irony. He went for a walk in the woods and picked one path over another on a journey back to the barn. “And that,” he wrote, “has made all the difference.” I imagine him smiling as he penned those words. Sometimes a walk in the woods is a walk in the woods. And that walk brought him to the place where he wrote a poem that has touched many readers since, whether or not they understood the irony. When people ask how Ginger and I met, the short answer is we were at the same Midwinter Retreat for the Southwest Baptist Camping Group in January of 1989 at Camp Olympia. The longer version involves both of us looking back at choices we had made independently of each other such that we both ended up in Texas, with ties to Royal Lane Baptist Church, and on that retreat – all slight changes that grew in importance. In the days since, we’ve both been intentional about the slight ways we remind each other of our love, all of which are important.

Lent, like most of the Christian life, is not a grand gesture but a collection of slight and intentional movements. Even the grandest cathedrals were put together brick by brick, which means every brick counts, every word matters, for each holds the possibility of an important slight change.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: thin skinned

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It’s been almost a year since I stepped out of a professional kitchen to return to teaching. Though I still cook daily at home and for friends, I’m not doing quite the volume I once was. One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed is in my hands. Because of the prep work – dicing onions, carrots, and celery for soups, for example – I built up two huge calluses on the index finger on my right hand because of the way I held up my knife. The calluses built up to protect me from pain. The skin became thick and tough in places where I once developed blisters, where the wear and pressure came everyday, where I had to get stronger to survive.

One year later, they are mostly gone.

One of my favorite Bill Mallonee songs from his Vigilantes of Love days is called “Skin” and is written about Vincent Van Gogh, who was too tender to take the pain of his life. The chorus sings,

now look if you’re gonna come around here
and say those sort of things
you gotta take a few on the chin
you’re talking about love and all that stuff
you better bring your thickest skin

We have calluses; we become callous. Both words can be traced back to the same Latin word, which means “hard skinned” or “thick skinned.” Callus described my finger; callous we use to talk about what happens to our hearts and minds as we face life’s persistent pain. In her sermon on Sunday, Ginger quoted a line from the novel, The Help (which I’m next in line to read), whose story centers around race issues in a domestic context in the South. One of the narrators, an African-American housekeeper, talks about how the pain affects the younger ones “who ain’t built up a callus to it yet.” The callousness of the privileged called for calluses among the help.

The disappearance of my calluses seems like a worthy Lenten metaphor: let the protection dissolve, drop my guard, and feel those things to which I had allowed myself to become numb, or at least unfeeling, for whatever reason. The disciplines of silence and focus, of laying aside and attending, allow our vulnerability to flourish. The point of life is not so much to toughen up but to stay woundable, if we follow Jesus’ example. When Thomas was unsure they were telling him the truth about Jesus’ resurrection, he asked to see the wounds. The callous and endless news cycle in which we live calluses our hearts and minds to the pain around the world because the presentation is as perfunctory as it is painful. Images of Japan are sandwiched between sports scores and celebrity craziness as if they all held equal weight. Each cycle builds another layer of separation; the news becomes white noise that we no longer hear.

The intentional repetition of faithful ritual runs counter to eh callusing motion of much of life. Perhaps one way to understand the bread and the wine as Broken Body and Blood is the meal is an act of compassion, of opening the wounds, of de-callusing and de-callousing our hearts that we might feel the weight of the world as we come to terms with the gravity of grace.

“Awake, my soul,” sing Mumford and Sons, channeling the Psalmist:

in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
where you invest your love, you invest your life
in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
where you invest your love, you invest your life
awake my soul

To be awake means to do the prep work everyday without developing the calluses. Nicodemus looked puzzled when Jesus told him he had to be born again. Jesus wasn’t talking in slogans any more than I think he was speaking of one experience. Following Christ means being born again and again and again. We need our hearts scrubbed clean of calluses, brought fresh into the world over and over, that we might see with open eyes and feel with tender skin all those who need to know they are really, really loved. We need to be born again and again to see the promise that lies in our lives where we have settled for routine or expediency, where we have been beaten down by failure, where we give in to despair. We need to be born again and again to pick one another up, to hope for one another, to feel the pricks and aches of what it means to love. I think my friend Bill will allow the paraphrase of his lyric because I know his heart:

you’re talking about love and all that stuff
you better bring your thinnest skin

Let us love the world unflinchingly, setting our hearts to be born again and again.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: sunday sonnet #22

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John 3:1-17 was the lectionary passage today: Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus. One phrase in their conversation, which was translated in the King James as “born again,” has been a dividing qualifier of sorts in Christianity, unfortunately. Besides being born again (as in “one more time”), it can also be read as “born anew” (recreation with a new and different nature) and “born from above” (as in transcendent, or able to see with God’s eyes). I hesitate a little with all this explanation because a poem is a bit like a joke in the sense that explanation doesn’t necessarily help its impact, yet hearing the three ways the phrase can be read made me think what they all share in common is a sense of ongoing transformation.

As part of her sermon, Ginger quoted from a prayer by Oscar Romero, part of which says:

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

I’m grateful for the prayer for several reasons, not the least of which is that it serves as subtext for the closing couplet.

sunday sonnet #22

As a child I learned John 3:16:
that I needed to be “born again”
as if only one thing could it mean —
walk the aisle and turn away from sin.

“Again” is not the only option
in translation choices are a few;
others that are vying for adoption –
“born from above”, and “born anew.”

Semantics somehow shape the story –
the very way we see and hear it;
and when those options we ignore we
can miss the nuance of the Spirit.

Prophets of a future not our own,
we plant seeds that one day will be grown.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: coming clean

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After I finished writing what follows here, I decided I needed to write a brief preface. I don’t usually do so, but I also don’t get specifically political very often. I am troubled by the bombings that began today because of what it says about who we think we are and who are choosing to be as a nation in our world. I needed somewhere to say so out loud. Thanks for listening.

A number of years ago, Ginger and I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C… I remember, in particular, standing in a small room whose walls went up twelve or fourteen feet and were covered with photographs from a village in Russia. The explanatory plaque on the wall told of this community of Russian Jews that were all murdered. The only things left were the photographs in front of me. The pictures were taken when the people in them didn’t know they were going to be killed. There were wedding pictures, family portraits, and shots of friends probably taken for no other reason than someone had a camera. The photographs hung on the walls in the museum without any relational context other than our common humanity and the reminder of what we are capable of doing to one another. More than once, as we journeyed through the museum, we heard or read the words, “Never again.”

A little over a week ago, my Documentary Studies class watched Ghosts of Rwanda, which returned to the country ten years after the genocide of 1994 in which 800,000 people were killed in 100 days. Europe and America did little more than send in planes to get the white people out. The very few UN “peace keepers” in the country were not allowed to even shoot their guns.

Today, on the anniversary of the U. S. invasion of Iraq, we launched “Operation Oddesy Dawn” and began bombing Libya. The Huffington Post said,

In announcing the mission during a visit to Brazil, President Barack Obama said he was reluctant to resort to force but was convinced it was necessary to save the lives of civilians. He reiterated that he would not send American ground troops to Libya.

“We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy,” he said in Brasilia.

During the film on Rwanda, they showed a clip of President Clinton explaining why the U. S. wasn’t intervening. After what happened in Mogadishu, he said, we would not longer intervene unless we had “a compelling national interest.” The truth is we, as a country, can stand by while tyrants and terrorists run amok, as long as they aren’t killing Americans or they don’t have large oil reserves. The civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has gone on for years. Millions have been killed. The armies have consistently used rape as a weapon. In 2004, we said out loud that what was happening in the Darfur region of Sudan was genocide and we still have done nothing. We are bombing Libya for primarily economic reasons, not humanitarian ones. (I’m not sure you can ever bomb someone for humanitarian reasons; that’s too incomprehensible an irony for me.)

In this season of penitence, perhaps we would do well as a nation to come clean about our intentions, at least to ourselves. As long as there were no protesters in Libya, we kept their money in our banks and sold them weapons – not the really nasty ones, but weapons nonetheless. We will care about African nations when they find oil within their borders. We are more interested in things being stable around the world than we are in people being free and fed. Forgive us, Lord, even though we aren’t particularly repentant. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: in the dark

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I came across this post by Tim Suttle tonight over at The Huffington Post and, as I read down, found one of my favorite Annie Dillard quotes:

God asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things. You do not have to do these things unless you want to know God. They work on you not on him … you do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

The quote stuck out to me because I had been thinking of it only a few minutes before as I stared at a blank page trying to figure out what to write. My thought process began with the news stories I saw today about the full moon being the biggest one we’ve seen in twenty years. That reminded me of Italo Calvino’s wonderfully odd collection of short stories called Cosmicomics. One story, “The Distance of the Moon,” recalled a time when the earth and moon came close enough every night for people to jump between them.

Orbit? Oh, elliptical, of course: for a while it would huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while. The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high that nobody could hold them back. There were nights when the moon was very, very low and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair;’s breadth; well, let’s say, a few yards anyway. Climb up to the Moon? Of course, we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder up to it and scramble up.

The story goes on in even more fantastical fashion. Ever since I first read it, I’ve wanted to write a song called, “Ladder to the Moon.” Calvino and Dillard both understand the value and importance of going out into the dark to see the light. I imagine Dillard’s words have shown up in any number of Lenten meditations since she first wrote them. On this Big Moon Weekend, I’m happy to hear them again.

The reason, however, that her words came to mind in the first place was because I was thinking differently about the dark. There is the dark we allow to envelop us like fading house lights in a grand theater so we can better see the stars and ourselves. There is also the dark that descends like weighted rain, that painfully surprises us, that isolates and discourages. These first few days of Lent this year have held more of the latter than the former. I have friends who are hurting and grieving, who are out in the dark and the stars appear to have abandoned them. All I know to do is keep calling their names so they know, at least, they are not alone.

A designated season of preparation in the darkness is one of our underappreciated luxuries. Those who walked and lived with Jesus didn’t know it was Lent. There was no Ash Wednesday. But there was darkness. Incomprehensible, alienating, devastating darkness. The closer Jesus got to the cross, the darker things became. They didn’t look at stars. They slept and wept at Gethsemane. They ran away. They betrayed. They denied. They grieved.

The disciples didn’t know the tomb would be empty as they watched Jesus die and then buried him. They shared the same sense of failure and loneliness I hear and see in my friends. None of them is without faith, but they are without relationships they had counted on to last. They are sitting in the dark, but not star-gazing. Though I’ve had my seasons where the darkness was crushing, this year the darkness is a backdrop to the stars. I’m well aware that I cannot change their circumstances, nor can fix much of anything. I can sit in the dark with them, as others did with me. If I don’t go out into the darkness, I won’t see the stars.

Neither will I find my friends who need to be found.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: allergic reaction

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“Works of art are not born in flashes of the imagination, but in daily fidelity.”
— Albert Camus (quoted in Stephen Dunn’s Walking Light)

The beginning of pollen season is killing me here. I found the above quote as I was reading Dunn’s book and waiting until it was time to take my next Benadryl.

allergic reaction

allergies are anathema to thought
there is no room for rumination
in my mucus-muddled membranes
eyelids dropping like garage doors
nose clogged like a rush hour street
all of my ideas are weary immigrants
unsure of who can be trusted
to lead them to free expression
all I can tell them is show up again
tomorrow and the day after that
come back everyday until your
faithfulness acts as antihistamine
come back the morning after rain
or the evening of the first frost
the afternoon we plant vegetables
and the day that nothing happens
soon we will know each other well
enough to create between sneezes

Peace,
Milton

evensong

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the lingering light of spring
loses to the descending dark
despite our best efforts to
hold the night at bay

(there’s no way around it)

the only way to daylight
is to live through till dawn
which all works fine until
I tell you this is metaphor

(it is a poem, after all)

the dark is undaunted
the dawn’s in no hurry
we’re going to hurt like this
for the rest of our lives

(is there any good news?)

we must answer slowly
as deliberately as snails
holding hearts and hurts
for as long as it stays dark

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: photographer’s light

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One of the photographs of Jesus I keep
in the wallet of my mind is of him
looking out over Jerusalem.

The sun is burning the last bits of blue
out of the Palestinian sky as it sets,
making room for the night.

There is enough light to see the tears
running down his cheeks as he
talks about mother hens.

The gospel accounts would have me think
that I possess a one of a kind photo,
but — after a day like today

when I’ve sat with my friends and heard
the grief harbored in their hearts,
I begin to understand

it could have been taken on any one
of the nights he walked the earth,
at most any sunset.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: left undone

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Today was a long day.

I watched as one of our students learned the very hard way that actions have consequences. Big consequences. In this case, they will have to find another school. The details are not my to tell, for both personal and professional reasons, other than to say they did serious enough damage to others with their words that it could be called a hate crime. I know, those are incendiary words, and may seem extreme as a label for what might have started out as a middle school prank. But the words were no joke and we, as a faculty, felt it mattered that we take what they did seriously and let the one who was attacked know they were not alone. It is a risky move for a small private school, and one that could have economic repercussions, and it was the right thing to do.

My Documentary Studies class and I finished watching Ghosts of Rwanda, a Frontline documentary produced ten years after the genocide ended in that country. 800,000 Tutsi people were killed by the Hutus, Rwanda’s larger ethnic group, in 100 days. That’s right: 100 days. (You can follow the timeline here.) The rest of the world let it happen. American and European planes came to get their citizens out. The UN pulled most all of their troops out after eight Belgian soldiers were killed. In the aftermath of all that had gone wrong in Somalia, President Clinton explained we would only intervene where we had a specific “national interest.” As with most of Africa, Rwanda didn’t qualify. For all our Holocaust memorials inscribed with “Never Again,” we sat back and watched it happen. I watched footage of State Department officials debating the definition of the word genocide so they could not be painted into a corner to have to act. When it was over, Western diplomats and government officials made their penitent journeys to the sites where so many had been brutally murdered, offered their empty regrets, and gathered around tables at the UN to talk about what they should have done. I have to say, if I were a citizen of most any African nation, I wouldn’t count on anyone showing up when it happens again. Diplomacy is about expediency rather that truth, when it gets right down to it.

As the evening draws to a close, I find myself back at the prayer of confession, and the line about forgiving us for the things we have left undone. Part of me reads those words and wants to take off on a bit of a rant to ask how we as Christians can sit silently while there are still people held without being charged at Guantanamo, while our immigration policy allows for people to be held in prisons without any civil rights or due process, while our government debates the definition of torture much as they did the definition of genocide to cover their actions, while we continue to cut programs to help the poor and hungry in our country while we continue to feed our military appetites. It’s a worthy rant and we need to be speaking up, yet it is not the word for tonight.

Both the middle schooler and the movie remind me, as a straight white Christian American male, that I’m at the top of The Privileged List. I’m the one Western civilization was cut to fit. I’m the one Western Christianity has catered to. And I am called by God to level things out. God loves me and the rest of the straight white guys, but God doesn’t love us more than anyone else. And God calls me and the rest of the straight white guys to incarnate that indiscriminate love in a way that costs us, a way that loosens our grip on power, a way that doesn’t feed on self-interest, a way that goes out to compel everyone to come to the table for the feast.

It’s too raw to say much more.

Peace,
Milton