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weighting room

2

it’s not the same you know

waiting in line
waiting for the phone to ring
waiting (waiting) for the world to change

tonight I am not passing time
or fostering impatience
I am waiting for news
No – I am weighting for news
time is not passing
time is falling in layers
each one heavier than the last
each one heavy with hope
and uncertainty

I am weighting for the phone to ring
and, yes, for the world to change

Peace,
Milton

sailing around the kitchen

4

Tonight was a night to remember in the kitchen because nothing really happened. And it was a night I learned from my coworkers.

I shared the evening with Mitch, our line cook (and among the best read line cooks with whom I’ve had the privilege of working), and Arnaldo, our dish washer (whom I have written about before). Both of them are at stations in their lives where working part-time in our little kitchen is what they need to do. It was an average evening from a business standpoint, which meant we had time to talk as we worked, and time to get to know one another better.

Mitch is an avowed Bob Dylan fan and brought a CD of John Wesley Harding in for us to listen to as we prepped for dinner. In the process of the rambling discussion that followed about favorite Dylan songs, I learned that he sang at the March on Washington. Right after Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream,” he sang “When the Ship Comes In.”

A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline
And the sun will respect
Every face on the deck
The hour that the ship comes in

We got off to a slow start, which meant Arnaldo had finished the pots and pans left from the afternoon prep and was with us on the line, because he makes the salads and desserts. I knew from talking with him before that he had some ship stories of his own, and that he had been in the Cuban Army and had been sent as a solider to fight in Angola back in the Seventies. He also had told me the reason he left Cuba was they wanted him to go and fight in Ethiopia, but he refused. Tonight, he was telling Mitch the story and he responded to Arnaldo by saying, “You were a part of the Mariel Boatlift?” (Like I said, Mitch is one well-read line cook.)

Arnaldo smiled. “You’re a smart guy, he said. I tell my story all the time and nobody in America knows about Mariel.” Between April and September, 1980, Cuba allowed people to come to the United States. (This is a really simplified telling.) One of the controversies was some of the folks Cuba sent our way were prisoners they wanted to get rid of. Arnaldo chose to come because they said they would imprison him for life for not being willing to fight if he didn’t leave. He knew nobody here, spoke no English, and came to Durham because of a sponsorship through a Presbyterian church. After a year, the sponsorship dried up and he was on his own. Now, almost thirty years later, he is washing dishes in our kitchen, showering us all with his indefatigable kindness, and singing Cuban songs as he goes about his work.

Earlier this week, my friend, Gordon posted a wonderful article on the essential impact of individual relational encounters. He words have hung on to me since I read them:

I tend to be a little suspicious when I hear someone refer to large, vague categories of people. We often speak of “the poor” and “the rich,” as though those groups had unionized and were meeting regularly to decide policy and organize action committees. “If only the rich would be more generous,” one person bemoans, while a another says, “If only the poor would take advantage of their opportunities.” I’ve got news for you. The rich and the poor will never act in one accord because there are no such groups. There are only people. Some are rich, some are poor, most are in between, and all of them are individuals. And in the end, I believe that loving individual people is our first and highest calling.

I came home tonight to words my blogging friend, Simon, shared as a part of his latest blog post, quoting Jurgen Moltmann “on the contemporary ‘distress of time’ and the advent of ‘homo accelerandus’”:

He has a great many encounters, but does not really experience anything, since although he wants to see everything, he internalizes nothing and reflects upon nothing. He has a great many contacts but no relationships, since he is unable to linger because he is always ‘in a hurry’. He devours ‘fast food’, preferably while standing, because he is no longer able to enjoy anything; after all, a person needs time for enjoyment, and time is precisely what he does not have.

I can recognize the accelerated being in myself far more quickly than I would like. My days fill up and drag on at a pace that make both my knees and my heart ache. With that in mind, I can do nothing better tonight than to make time for thanks. I am deeply grateful for an evening of discovery, sailing with the two of my crew around the room on the sea of conversation, fueled by the winds of music and memory, and the reminder that what truly saves us is sailing together.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — Here’s Bob.

prize musings

2

In the fall of 2000, my friend Jack and I drove from Boston to Stanhope, New Jersey for the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. It was one of my favorite experiences, and I was reminded of it when I came across the poster I bought (and never framed) cleaning up our office/studio here in Durham. I bought the poster because of the quote from a Rumi poem:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Tonight, as I’ve been sitting here trying to find a way to phrase what is going on in my head and heart around the responses to President Obama being a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, I came across a link to an article written by J. Parker Palmer while I was trolling my Facebook. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach and Listening to Your Life have been pivotal books in my life, so I followed the link to “The Politics of the Brokenhearted: Opening the Heart of American Democracy,” and found:

There are two ways for the heart to break. The brittle heart will shatter into a thousand pieces that are very nearly impossible to retrieve and reassemble. But if the heart is a supple, well-exercised muscle, it can be broken open rather than apart, giving us a larger capacity for both suffering and hope.

The broken-open heart is not the gift of a special few; life gives us many opportunities to exercise our hearts. I know many people whose hearts have been broken by the loss of something or someone they deeply love. They have lost jobs in a heartless market, homes in a corrupt economy, children to their own bad choices, elders to death. And yet many of these people, in the wake of their losses, have not become bitter and withdrawn. They have become more compassionate, extending their hearts to other sufferers and reaching out with forgiveness to the people who caused their pain.

If we can learn from such losses in our lives, the broken-open heart can become the source of what Lincoln called “the bonds of affection,” a sense of unity amid diversity. And that, in turn, will allow us to do what citizens of a democracy must do: engage with issues of great moment that require a collective and creative response.

The recent history of American political discourse (and by recent, I’m speaking particularly to the environment exemplified by the twenty-four hour news channels over the last several years)is not of creativity, or collectivity for that matter, but one centered around fear. For a people who consider themselves to be the most powerful nation on earth, we live frightened lives. And I don’t mean just because of September 11, 2001. On almost any issue, what we accept as discussion is for people to run to their opposite poles and take shots at each other, each of us bent on defending our position as though we are under attack. We don’t want to lose power, lose control, or just lose, period. There is no field in which to meet, only fox holes from which to fire.

I honestly didn’t know much about the Nobel Prize until I started reading tonight. I still don’t know much, but what I do know is the prize, in it’s hundred and eight year history has been influenced by politics (mostly local Norwegian ones, because Norwegians make up the committee), economics, humanitarian values, and personalities. It’s had its hits and misses. In its most recent history, it has given the award as a way of making a statement about what it hopes will happen (and hoping to influence outcomes) as much as rewarding accomplishment. By the time I got through with the article, I could see that their choice of our President fit their pattern over the years. That said, and even though I think the award is pretty cool, I thought they were a little premature in their choice.

Then I remembered being in Turkey a few years back. The very same CNN company that fills our screens with celebrity news anchors who love a good tirade had an international channel full of news: an hour on Asia, then Africa, then Europe, the South America . . . . Ginger and I were flabbergasted. The next day, we were on a bus tour with a group of international tourists and an Australian guy asked me why Americans didn’t seemed bothered by what was going on in the rest of the world and I said, based on the different news feeds I had seen, “They don’t know; our media chooses not to tell us.”

And so I wonder (I don’t know, but I wonder) if the Nobel Committee was offering an invitation in a way, or at least expressing hope that our willingness to elect Obama might mean we were willing to be a part of the world community and not determined to see ourselves as the exception. All the fray over this makes me think we don’t have a real sense of how the rest of the world sees us. We write off hostilities aimed our way by saying those people are jealous, or crazy. We often play the stereotype of the popular high school kid in most any high school movie who thinks everyone wishes they could be in their shoes. We are the country with the mot nuclear weapons who is determined for no one else to get them. (Yes, I understand why we don’t want Iran to have a bomb, and we have to come clean about the double-standard.) We would never think of letting anyone build a military base on our soil and yet we are quite comfortable building them all around the world. (Yes, I understand we feel we need to in order to protect our national interests, and we have to come clean about the double standard.) I’m guessing the rest of the world enjoys our continued emphasis that we are the most powerful nation on earth and they can’t live without us about as much as I would enjoy a Yankee fan getting in my face and yelling, “We’re Number One!”

I have to quote Palmer one more time:

The current sources of democracy’s danger are many and complex, and not directly traceable to one political party. They range from the dominance of big money to the divisiveness of religious fundamentalism; from the failures of mass journalism to the undemocratic dynamics of capitalism; from schools that ignore citizen education to political parties more concerned with their own survival than the survival of democracy.

But the root cause of democracy’s peril is that we, the people, fail to understand the meaning of our citizenship—and fail to use the means at our disposal when threats to democracy arise. Democracy fails when we withdraw from the fray, or stay in it while trusting and talking with only the people who hate what we hate. Democracy fails when we allow the differences between us to loose the irrational and violent angels of our nature, having never called upon the “better angels” that Lincoln tried to evoke in his First Inaugural Address a month before the Civil War began.

And yet the better angels have not abandoned us, and there are ways to call them out. When we are able to meet each other at the level of heart, of soul, of human identity and integrity, the barriers that blind us to each other’s humanity become thinner and the gaps that divide us become smaller. Heart, soul, identity and integrity, call it what you will: it is the “being” in human being, and it has no race or ethnicity, no creed or doctrine, no philosophical, ideological or political commitments.

We are bigger than our fear. We are more than our party affiliations. We are not Number One, but rather one of many. Let’s break our hearts open together.

Peace,
Milton

worth passing along

2

It’s not often I quote something without a post to go with it, but time is short today and this is worth passing along.

From Pedro Arrupe:

Nothing is more practical than finding God,
that is, than falling in love
in a quite absolute, final way

What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you will do with your evenings,
how you will spend your weekends,
what you read,
who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Fall in love,
stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Peace,
Milton

photo + graphy

0

the word holds it’s own image
photo (light) – graphy (writing)
rays as old as the universe
captured on paper, looking
like you and me one past
afternoon, another at sunset,
and on through the stack of
time that stays in the old
shoebox, waiting to be seen
again, to let the years’ light
catch up like stars we can
finally see, the click of the
camera writing the light
like an icon, a window to
heaven, and I find, again,
I can stare into your eyes
and find the light never
goes out, no matter
how deep the darkness.

Peace,
Milton

straight talk

6

When I taught in the Boston Public Schools, one of my colleagues who became a friend was a man named Ed, who was a good eight inches taller than I was, in much better shape, and always had on a coat and tie. He is also African-American He told me a story of driving his friend’s BMW on the Southeast Expressway and being pulled over by a white cop who approached the car with his gun drawn and yelled, “What’s a n—–r like you doing driving a car like that?”

That has never happened to me, and the reason is because I’m white. In fact, I’m white and male and straight – the trifecta that means I know way more about privilege and access than I do about exclusion.

I have never had someone follow me around in a store because they were convinced I was going to shop lift just because of my skin color or appearance. I never had anyone write hate slogan on my school locker or trash my house because of who I was. I’ve never walked into a church and worried about whether or not I was welcome to worship. When Ginger and I married, we didn’t have to worry about the legality of our choice.

I mention all those things because they came to my mind as I sat at church Saturday afternoon in the middle of our church’s marking of our tenth anniversary as an Open and Affirming congregation, which means everyone is welcome regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. And they all came to mind when our speaker, Yvette Flunder, asked, “How do we include those who can’t hide the essence of their marginalities?” I thought about them as I talked to one of the members of the Common Woman Chorus, who sang as a part of the celebration, who grew up in church as a child but had not been in years because of the rejection she had experienced once she disclosed who she was. I watched as she tried to take in that church could actually be a loving and accepting place.

I spend a fair amount of time reading blogs and articles about the church, and I work hard to read across the spectrum that is Christianity. I have to say I think I am more discouraged than comforted by what I read because so much of what is written and said comes from a defensive posture, as though we need to stack sandbags around us to protect all that is good and right and true from the flood of all the things we have chosen to fear. I keep thinking about one of the first verses I ever remember learning in Sunday School: “Perfect love casts out fear.” (Right along with “God is Love” and “Love everyone as I have loved you.”)

I keep thinking about Jesus’ parable of the banquet where the invitations go out and all those who normally are included and used to seeing their pictures on the Society Page beg off with I-have-t0-polish-my-bowling-ball kinds of excuses. When the servants come back and the one throwing the party sees all the empty seats, he tells them to go out and invite any and everyone, to out “into the highways and the hedges and compel them to come in.” They fill up the room with those who reek of the essence of their marginalities, and a good time was had by all.

I have always imagined Jesus finishing the story and yelling, “All ye, all ye ox in free,” with a big grin on his face. The church Jesus imagined was one that made room for everyone, regardless. Everyone. The power of love that broke down barriers between Jews and Greeks in the early church; that saw a church in Jackson, Mississippi go from one that hired armed guards to keep black people out in the Sixties grow into a multiethnic congregation today; the power of love that fueled the passion of Martin Luther King, Jr. to say we could not afford to wait anymore for change to come; that called our congregation – along with many others — to be Open and Affirming; and that drives Amar, a man we met last Friday, to work to find work and housing for Nepalese refugees who are coming to Durham; is the same love that casts out fear, foments hope, and issues audacious invitations.

It was the love that was alive and well in our church this weekend. My heart is still full of the hope and joy I felt in that service, and in the one that followed on Sunday morning. And I have had a hard time finding words to write about it because I keep looking for words that build a bridge between the Baptist world that led me to faith in Christ and my home in the UCC, where that faith led me, words that would incite inclusion all around in Jesus’ name. I think back to my days as a youth minister and wonder who we might have reached had our youth group been decidedly open and affirming. We were a welcoming bunch, for sure, yet I still wonder.

What I heard again this weekend was if those at the margins are going to find their way into the circle it will be because those of us on the inside decided to make room. And I, the straight white Christian male, am about as inside as it gets. I am called to go out into the highways and the hedges, to make room for everyone I can, to love and love and love, to listen and not to judge.

One of the songs the Common Woman Chorus sang was a Holly Near chorus that has stayed with me. I think we are going to make it our new benediction at church:

I am open and I am willing
for to be hopeless would seem so strange
it dishonors those who go before us
so lift me up to the light of change

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: when I stand before God to account for my life, if God says, “Why did you let so many people in?” I’ll take the hit. I can live with that. If God were to say, “Why did you keep closing the door when I intended there to be room for everyone?” I couldn’t take it.

Peace,
Milton

celebrate the poet

3

I have been in poetry mode all this week, so it seems only fitting that I should discover, here in the dregs of this day, that today is W. S. Merwin’s birthday. In honor of his celebrating another year on the planet, I offer two or three of his poems. The first two I found reading the transcript of an interview with Bill Moyers.

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

I know he packs his poems with so much that it is perhaps a bit unfair to line them up one after the other, but you can come back and read them again.

Yesterday

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father’s hand the last time

he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don’t want you to feel that you
have to
just because I’m here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don’t want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

The last poem I offer as my part in celebrating this wonderful poet is one I have posted before but keep coming back to myself.

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
Tonight, I am saying thank you.

Happy birthday, Mr. Merwin, and thank you.

Peace,
Milton

late september

2

there was something in the autumnal air
to begin with: not a chill, an awakening
as soon as I stepped out of the house
I breathed in the crisp chill of possibility
and, as I turned toward the car, I saw
the sky – cloudless, clear, and colored in
open invitation blue; all that was missing
was a soundtrack, which I added once
I started the car and drove into my day
(new indigo girls, if you must know)
would that the day had stayed as clear,
that something more materialized than
the rhythmic restlessness of routine,
but I saw more stove than sun – still,
as I drove home in the dark and parked
in the same driveway where I had seen
and felt joy sidle up like an old friend
I could still sense the shadows of hope
lurking in the last vestiges of the garden
waiting for daylight; this is not over yet.

Peace,
Milton

prayer time

2

at our church means saying where
it hurts, or who it hurts, out loud
we call the names of those we love
and those we know who are sick
or dying or have lost someone or
are just lost and our pastor tells us
God is not waiting for her to repeat
the requests — our joys and concerns
do not require pastoral ventriloquy.

today, in the midst of the litany of
loss and light came a voice – a wise
voice – of one who chooses her words
and her moment well and she asked
that we pray for our country because
we seem to have forgotten how to be
respectful to one another and I thought
wait a minute she’s praying for God
to change us and for us to be willing

to change, to let go of the need to be
right or important or right and to
listen and be kind as though the
other one is as important as we think
we are, as essential as we imagine
ourselves, as valuable as we deem
ourselves to be too many prayers
like hers and, God help us, we might
begin to think we could change.
God help us.

Peace,
Milton

story time

2

a story has an arc, the teacher told us
and drew a line like a colorless rainbow
on the blackboard — you remember, right?

exposition, rising action — fueled by conflict
the climax at the top, and then falling action
falling so far that we spoke French: denouement

resolution to you and me and I wondered what
would happen if I changed one letter: arc to ark
and the story became a journey rather than a

rollercoaster, crammed full of critters and no map
there might still be conflict, but everything would
rise and fall on how well we learned to live together

whose turn is was to row – and to cook, how long
the doves would be gone and, without a doubt,
what we would do if the hippos got restless

Peace,
Milton