don't eat alone

Language was opening me up in ways I couldn’t explain and I assumed it was part of the apprenticeship of a poet. (Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand)

apprentice
c.1300, from O.Fr. aprentiz “someone learning” (13c.), from aprendre (Mod.Fr. apprendre ) “to learn, teach,” contracted from L. apprehendere (see apprehend). Aphetic form prentice was long more usual in English. The verb is first attested 1630s. (www.dictionary.com)

apprenticeship 

I learned how to be a cook by watching
and listening to those whose hands
were already calloused before
I ever picked up a kitchen knife.
Now I have calluses of my own.

I learned how to be a poet by reading
and listening to those whose hearts
were already broken open before
I ever chased down a metaphor.
Now I have a hunger for words.

I’m three weeks away from my last shift in
the kitchen and the calluses
are already fading, peeling off, though
I am still making dinner at home.
Cooking is in my blood.

I’m five days away from my last writing,
though my heart has been opened
up already, I have fallen private,
forgetting to write out loud for friends
who gather like dinner guests.

I teach for a living, though my calling
is to learn, to apprentice,
to soak up smells and sounds, words and wonders,
to come to table and tablet that
I might taste and see what is good.

Peace,
Milton

When it comes to faith, I started early.

I was five years old when I walked down the aisle at Westbury Baptist Church in Houston, Texas and gave my heart to Jesus. I was the oldest son and namesake of a Southern Baptist preacher, the son of two parents who sang me to sleep with hymns I still sing, and what I understood was Jesus loved me and the best thing I could do was love him back. So, as I have often joked, I turned from my life of sin and sex and drugs and gave my life to God.

I was about fourteen or fifteen when I began to come to terms with my faith in a more significant way, but even then it was pretty much me and Jesus. I didn’t go on a quest to search out the religious options available to me; I opened my heart to the God I knew. I have stayed a Christian and have bet my life on the reality of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, and I have to understand that one of the significant reasons I am a Christian is I was born into a family that taught me what questions to ask and where to look for both answers and more questions.

I realize I am a couple of paragraphs into my book review without mentioning Stephen Prothero’s new work, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter, but the book took me back to my childhood and how I came to faith because it challenged me to read through his descriptions of the “great religions” of the world with a different ear. (I have to jump to his conclusion for the quote.)

[T]here is a secular way to talk about religion. This . . . way does not assume that religion in general, or any religion in particular, is either true or false, because to make such an assumption is to be talking about religion religiously. It aims instead simply to observe and report, as objectively as possible, on this thing human beings do, for good or for ill (or both). (336)

I know. He said we should have a secular conversation about religion. He’s right. As I read through the chapters about the religions other than my own (Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism, Yoruba, Buddhism, Judaism, and Daoism), I began to see where our sound byte world has left me with a postage stamp view of a panoramic landscape, no matter which religion was being explained. As I read the chapter on Christianity, I realized a religion cannot be fully described, even in a very well written chapter. And he writes well because he writes with a keen secular eye, full of compassion and interest without choosing sides or seeking an agenda beyond the invitation for conversation.

What I learned, again, is the way to be a good conversationalist is to listen first.

He offers one phrase tag lines for each of the religions discusses and a formula for how he breaks them down (problem, solution, technique, exemplar) for the purpose of comparison, but the point is not to end up with a simplistic understanding; he’s making a case for understanding the religions of the world are not merely rephrasings of the same truth, as our emphasis on tolerance or inclusion often leads us to think. We will not learn how to talk to each other by finding ways to feel alike, or watering down what matters so our colors blend.

I hope for a world in which human beings can get along with their religious rivals. I am convinced, however, that we need to pursue this goal through new means. Rather than beginning with the sort of Godthink that lumps all religions together in one trash can or treasure chest, we must start with a clear-eyed understanding of the fundamental differences in both belief and practice between Islam and Christianity, Confucianism and Hinduism.

Some people are sure that the only foundation on which inter-religious civility can be constructed is the dogma that all religions are one. I am not one of them. Every day across the world, human beings coexist peacefully and even joyfully with family members who are very different from themselves. (335)

I read those words today, after returning from a family gathering for my youngest nephew’s graduation from Wheaton College. Trust me: he’s on to something.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — This review is part of a virtual book tour.

I’m writing this morning from a hotel in Napier, Illinois, which borders Wheaton, Illinois, home of Wheaton College, which, for the last four years, has been home for my nephew, Scott, who graduated yesterday. As much of the family as could get here gathered to celebrate him and his achievement, as well as making time for Mother’s Day and closing it all out with Ginger’s birthday celebration at Portillo’s, a Chicago favorite (or so we were told).

Scott is one of the good guys. No — one of the great guys. He has a strong mind, a huge heart, a free spirit, a great voice, and he plays a mean guitar. Saturday night we got to hear his bluegrass band, The Creepers, play their final concert together. The band was born out of their friendships. When they arrived on campus four years ago, a bunch of guys on the same hall started jamming together on Saturday mornings and from there they grew into a band that has been, arguably, the biggest draw on the Wheaton campus. The families of the guys gathered at the house of the sister of the fiancée of one of them and listened and laughed with them for a couple of hours as they sang their way back through their memories into the present tense and the tangible bonds of love that we could see connecting them as they serenaded us.

I couldn’t help but think of Pierce Pettis’ wonderful lyric to “You’re Gonna Need This Memory”:

if all we got for all our trouble
is just this box of souvenirs
still it’s worth a lot just to remember
just so we know that we were here

We were altar builders, conspirators of indelible hope, singing and clapping and laughing and loving our way into a memory that marked us all. We did not leave the same as we had come because the guys dared to friend each other (if I can borrow a Facebook verb) with such reckless abandon. They spent four years singing and playing and caring about each other without plans to hit the road or record a hit; they have been friends for the sake of being friends, singing their own soundtrack, and are now striking out in different directions, yet still tethered by the bonds of love.

I’ve only got a couple of paragraphs before I have to pack and start working our way back to Durham and the ties that bind us there, but I’ve spent the morning in memories of my own, grateful for friends from dorm rooms long ago, with whom I gathered for jam sessions of our own (even singing some of the same songs) – grateful that I can say to Scott with some certainty that love of friends and family travels well, reaches far, and reminds us who we are.

Peace,
Milton

As I remember we sang a lot
about tin soldiers even as
our friends and brothers
drew lots to see who would
wade through rice paddies
and not come home
or come home dead inside

I was thirteen the spring
of the Kent State shootings
tin soldiers and Nixon coming
go ahead and hate your neighbor
the image of the girl
with her arms wide open
sticks in my mind
as though I saw her myself

Forty years on I’m not sure
any of us healed or remembered
well but finally on our own
one bloody morning after
another, still looking for
peace but not hard enough
one tin soldier still rides away

Peace,
Milton

In my new vocational incarnation, I am reading more, both books I’ve had stacked around for awhile and those I’m reading again with students. My tenth grade class is reading one of my favorite novels, Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, which tells the story of Stephen Kumalo’s search for his lost son. Kumalo is my favorite character in literature and the story is full of faith and humanity, as evidenced by this exchange between Kumalo and Father Vincent, his friend.

My friend, your anxiety turned to fear, and your fear turned to sorrow. But sorrow is better than fear. For fear impoverishes always, while sorrow may enrich.

Kumalo looked at him, with an intensity of gaze that was strange in so humble a man, and hard to encounter.

— I do not know that I am enriched, he said.

— Sorrow is better than fear, said Father Vincent doggedly. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.

— And where have I arrived? asked Kumalo.

— When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house, said Father Vincent in that symbolic language that is like the Zulu tongue. But when a house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house. (140)

Perhaps the passage has haunted me because the words sorrow and house show up in the same passage. Sorrow is spreading like ivy across our family as we watch Reuben, my father-in-law, fall deeper into Alzheimer’s. The doctor said he has moved from the “severely moderate” stage to “moderately severe,” and lest that sound like medical semantics, we can expect his disappearance to deepen in days and weeks rather than months. We are losing more and more of him and I, like Kumalo, do not know that I am enriched. What we do know is it is time to bring him to us.

Ginger and I are making plans for her parents to come and live here in Durham with us by the end of the summer. Rachel is his primary caregiver and will soon not be able to do it on her own, so the arriving of our sorrow brings us to a place where it is time to gather in close and cling to each other, borrowing from a lyric I wrote long ago. The practical implications of the decision begin with our becoming real estate tycoons for a time, selling their house in Birmingham, ours here in Durham, and buying a larger place to accommodate us all. (Anyone want to buy a house?) My recent job change brings with it the unexpected blessing of significant time off this summer; it looks as though I will spend a good bit of it in some sort of moving van.

There is plenty of fear to go around: fear of Reuben’s continuing digression, fear of their moving for the first time in a half a century, fear of how all of this gets paid for, fear of whatever else might happen. The sorrow, as in the story, is not far behind. Elizabeth Bishop is right: the art of losing isn’t hard to master. Sharing a house with Reuben will be giving absence an address in a way, his familiar yet vacant shell sitting down to dinner with us each evening. As he continues to forget, we, his family, are charged with re-membering both him and ourselves, putting the pieces back together on a daily basis, rebuilding what continues to fall apart.

Even as I write about it, I don’t know what to expect, or how to expect it.

The tenth graders wrote essays today, looking at the same passage I quote here, along with a couple of others that didn’t come from the book to give them something to bounce off of. Here are two of them:

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. – Ambrose Redmoon

There is much in the world to make us afraid. There is much more in our faith to make us unafraid. – Frederick W. Cropp

As I read them, I can hear Julie Miller singing in the background,

you have come by way of sorrow
you have come by way of tears
but you’ll reach your destiny
meant to find you all these years
meant to find you all these years

The reason I keep coming back to Stephen Kumalo is his story says what Cropp’s quote says: there is more in our faith to make us unafraid, even to make us bold. From where we are in the story right now, things only get worse for Kumalo, as far as circumstances go, and his compassion and faith only deepen. Father Vincent knows of what he speaks: sorrow makes for strong building blocks when it is shaped by courage and love. Part of the journey for Stephen is to a deeper understanding that he is not alone, either in the depth of his pain or the struggle for change.

The same is true for us.

We are not the first to watch helplessly as a loved one fade away before our eyes. We are not the first to struggle with the financial realities of what it means to be family. We are also not the first to trust that God is with us, as are a significant cloud of witnesses and fellow travelers. We are not alone.

We are not alone.

We are not alone. I might do well to let that begin most any paragraph I write because fear’s insidious intent is to erase that truth. We are not alone. I say it and remember it is as true for you as it is for me. In the midst of my real estate and reality, I am called to look up and offer a hand to you in your pain, even as I receive your offering.

We are not alone. What can separate us from the love of God? Will Alzheimer’s or distance or housing sales or debt? Will questions or sleeplessness or sorrow or fear? No. Nothing will separate us from a Love that will not let us go. We are not alone.

We are not alone.

Peace,
Milton

I preached this morning at our church here in Durham as the culmination of a study we did on the Book of Job. This is the text of my sermon, “The Last Word.”

Only four Saturdays have passed since a group of us gathered to study the story of Job together, and yet way more than a month of life seems to have passed by since then. One of the things that has changed for me is I have returned to teaching high school English, which means I’m once again reading books with my students. My ninth grade class is reading Night, Elie Weisel’s personal account of surviving not one but five concentration camps as a teenager, finally being freed from Buchenwald by the Allied forces, but not before having lived through brutal and dehumanizing things that hit at the core of his faith. As he describes one experience he writes:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never.

We read those words in class and I thought of Job and the string of surviving servants who showed up to tell him who and what had been destroyed. I thought of Job sitting on the garbage heap, scraping his open sores with a piece of broken pot as his wife implored him to “curse God and die.” I returned to our discussions around the tables in the Fellowship Hall where we listened to Job’s friends try to explain his suffering by blaming him or giving some sort of pat answer, but never really listening, never being willing to share the pain with him. And I wondered why his tragedy didn’t murder God or destroy his faith. “I know my Redeemer lives,” he said, even as he struggled to find God in the midst of his anguish.

We don’t have to look back to Job, or even look far to find similar examples of devastation. This morning, people in Mississippi are digging out from under the damage of the tornadoes that touched down there. The families and friends of the miners who died in West Virginia are gathering for a memorial service. They have still not found the eleven workers who were on the oil rig that blew up earlier this week. Though the stories are no longer attractive to our media, Haiti and Chile and China still live in the aftermath of earthquakes. Ginger and I were in New Orleans this week and heard people tell their stories of life after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. And we have not even talked about Darfur and Congo, AIDS, malaria, or those who starve to death daily in our world, as wellas the personal and overwhelming pain that comes with depression, or Alzheimer’s, or financial hardship, or severe illness.

It doesn’t take long in this life to get to a place where we ask where God is, as Job did, or seek to offer some sort of explanation as to why life has turned sour, as his friends were quick to do. “You’ve done something wrong,” they said to Job. “This must be your fault somehow because God wouldn’t do this to a good person.” “It’s your fault; repent and God will fix everything.”

Isn’t it great to have friends who care?

Job took all that was heaped upon him, including the lectures and advice, and kept calling God to show up and answer for what was going on. Finally, God did show up – or perhaps we are better to say God revealed God’s self because when God spoke the voice came “out of the whirlwind” – from the center of the struggle. God was in the middle of the storm, not as the cause, but as a Presence. And when God spoke, God did not say anything about Job’s sin or who was at fault or why Job had managed to pull the house down on himself and his family. God didn’t give any advice or offer any explanations at all. God asked questions.

Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? . . . Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this. Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home? Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?

God called Job to a different sense of perspective.

Yesterday marked the twentieth anniversary of the launching of the Hubble Telescope (as a follow up to our wedding, I’m sure). NPR has a wonderful story asking different scientists to pick out their favorite Hubble image over the years. One chose “The Ultra Deep Field,” which was taken by aiming the telescope at what appeared to be an empty patch in the night sky and left the lens open for about eleven days, soaking up all the light it could see and capturing the oldest light ever seen by humanity. The frame is full of tiny dots of light, each one, the astronomer said, containing a hundred million stars – all in a space we thought was empty.

“When I gaze into the night sky,” the psalmist wrote, “and see the wonders of your hand, who are we as humans that you are mindful of us?”

We are called to hold together the depth of pain and suffering that makes up our world, as we see at Auschwitz or in Rwanda or in the poverty of Haiti or the aftermath of Katrina along the Gulf Coast or in our personal struggles, and the wonder we have been shown by Hubble reminding us that if we leave our eyes open long enough in the dark the light, the ancient light as old as creation, will finally shine.

Francois Mauriac wrote in the foreword to Night,

We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to God.

All is grace. Listen closely: all is grace. We do not earn suffering anymore than we earn the love that God pours out on us from the moment we are breathed into existence. Life is difficult, sometimes even crushing, but not because we deserve to be crushed.

And our God is one who is acquainted with grief, who bears our grief, who never stops making stars, and who speaks out of the storm. Our God is one who responds to our cries, rather than simply answer our questions. Our God is stronger than death and destruction, more tenacious than any cancer or circumstance, more loving than any sense of alienation or worthlessness.

This is our Resurrection Story: all is grace; the last word for each of us belongs to God. And that word is Love: unfailing, unflinching, unending Love. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

We sat at the oyster bar at Felix’s
in the middle of a N’awlins afternoon,
eating fried food and listening to
the Chi-Lites, the O’Jays, even
Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes
sing Seventies soul as the smiling
shucker offered up oysters and
opinions, both free of cynicism.

From there, we wandered through
the shutters and smells of the Quarter
to Café du Monde, restaurant of the world,
for beignets and café au lait while
a street-wise incarnation of Sam
Cooke sang for smiles and tips.

This is the last afternoon of our first
twenty years: who knows how many
thousand and six hundred minutes
have added up to our story of two
common hearts, but it is a tale best
told in the small scenes that say
life with you is better now
than when we first began.

Peace,
Milton

Ginger and I leave in the morning to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary on the twenty-first, and we’re going to do it in New Orleans, thanks to our friend Jay. So I offer a little traveling music, that is to say, some of the songs we’ve carried with us in our wonderful journey so far.

Baby, it’s you.

Peace,
Milton

adjectives attach like
grammatical barnacles
explanatory sidecars
directing distinctions
guitars didn’t need them

until someone found
a Fender and plugged in
so we pulled out
acoustic and electric
to state the obvious

writing goes back
as far as the stories
and then one day some
scheduler needed a name
for a course and wrote

Creative Writing
legitimizing the mundane
and discounting words
it’s all creating whether
writing of stars or stones

Peace,
Milton

I have to admit I didn’t know it was a hymn the first time I heard it.

I was in tenth grade, living in Fort Worth, Texas during our year of leave from the mission field (as they used to say) and completely taken with American popular radio. It was the year of “American Pie” and “I’ll Take You There,” and “Morning Has Broken.” By the time I knew it was a hymn, it had also become the wake up music for any number of youth camps, beginning (for me, anyway) with First Baptist Richardson at Camp Ozark when Gene Wilkes and I would do a less than reverent, but nonetheless sacred version to call the young campers out into the day we had planned for them.

Our version broke morning wide open, I must say.

Last Sunday morning, the hymn broke in on me as I sat among our faithful to hear the first of the “Stories of Resurrection” we had been promised on the Sundays from Easter to Pentecost. We’re going off lectionary to look at particular stories both in scripture and in the world around us here in Durham. This week it was the Gospel According to Housing For New Hope, an amazing organization here that reaches out to homeless folks with tenacity and redemption. Three people told their stories and two others sang in between tales, ending with Terry, the founder and a church member and the best damn harmonica player I know, calling us all home with a medley of “Precious Lord” and “O When the Saints Go Marching In.”

And just before they began telling their stories we sang,

morning has broken like the first morning
blackbird has spoken like the first bird
praise for the singing praise for the morning
praise for them springing fresh from the word

It was also just after Suzanne, one of our church members who is a member of the Biblical Storytellers, delivered the story of Jesus and Peter at breakfast from memory and with meaning. The story is one of my favorites from the gospels. Peter, still despondent from his failure in the courtyard, had been fishing all night with his friends when Jesus called out to them from the shoreline. When Peter realized who was calling, he shucked whatever clothing he had and swam to shore, coming up in need of a robe and redemption, and probably in that order.

With the scene in my head as we began singing, I jotted down,

morning has broken
broken open –
like an egg
or heart
broken through
like a prisoner
or a prayer
darkness falls
but morning breaks
Peter at breakfast
broke like the morning
“yes, Lord, you know
I love you”
every day we live
is broken
before it starts

About the time I finished scribbling, we got to the third verse:

mine is the sunlight mine is the morning
born of the one light eden saw play
praise with elation praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new day

When Cat Steven’s sings it, he pronounces the second word in the final line with a short e, the way we say the word when we mean something we do for fun rather than meaning to create over again. Though we usually sing the second meaning in church, it seems, I think Cat is on to something: God at play. At its very core, its very essence, creation is a reflection of God having fun.

I am in the process of becoming a morning person again, now that I am back teaching. I haven’t stopped being a night owl, which is causing some issues when it comes to getting enough sleep, but I am seeing more of morning than I have in a long, long time. I walked out into a beautiful spring morning and couldn’t help but find the hymn again as I walked to my car. I’m not sure what clicked – maybe it’s the part about being on my way to teaching English – but I realized the song was not about morning being broken, but about morning having broken, as in having broken through.

darkness falls
but morning breaks through

The day is not what is broken, but what does the breaking, scattering chards of darkness all over the place. Morning has broken like that first morning when God said, “Let there be light,” accompanied by a giant belly laugh with enough playful energy to burst that first dawn into existence. When it comes to playing, God means business. The juke box in my mind switched to Michael Been and The Call:

here’s to the babies in a brand new world
here’s to the beauty of the stars
here’s to the travelers on the open road
here’s to the dreamers in the bars

here’s to the teachers in the crowded rooms
here’s to the workers in the fields
here’s to the preachers of the sacred words
here’s to the drivers at the wheel

here’s to you my little love
with blessings from above
now let the day begin

There are days we break through or in or out, and then there are days we end up broken on the beach, like Peter, hoping for forgiveness and maybe some breakfast. Either way, most every day holds its share of broken places, as Leonard Cohen reminds us.

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in

May it dawn on us that we belong to a God whose love and laughter are deep enough to fuel suns and forgive stumbling saints who wash up on the beach at breakfast, or stuck in traffic, or standing in line at Starbucks.

Here’s to you, my little love, with blessings from above.

Peace,
Milton