don't eat alone

After walking through Lent to Easter, a journey in which time stretches out like a path leading us somewhere, I came across an interesting list yesterday of things that all happened on April 14, making time feel more like a totem or a sculpture where the different blocks are stacked one on top of the other. The list is courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac:

• On this day in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.
• It’s the birthday of the woman who taught the blind and deaf child Helen Keller how to communicate: Anne Sullivan, born in Agawam, Massachusetts (1866).
• Shortly before midnight on this date in 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic.
• It was on this day in 1939 that John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath was published.

I’ve been turning the list over in my mind for these couple of days, intrigued by the date they share in common, these two tragedies and two births, if you will. As one who shares a birthday with Gustav Flaubert, Edvard Munch, Frank Sinatra, Dionne Warwick, Jennifer Connelly, and Yuvraj Singh, I realize grouping by a date on the calendar is rather arbitrary and I’ve stayed intrigued by what the assassination, the sinking, the birth, and the novel might have to say together.

For someone of my generation (and perhaps others, too), all four things are larger than life. So much has been written and said about Lincoln, particularly our politicians trying to claim some sort of connection, that the man we think of now when we hear his name is probably not the same man shot in the theater that night. The tragedy of the Titanic has been romanticized and retold into an epic metaphor of disaster. Anne Sullivan is the one who was able to help Helen Keller, well, become Helen Keller. And Steinbeck’s book, which is sure to see a resurgence thanks to our current economic times, gave us Tom Joad, one of the great characters of American literature (and, by the way, you can watch the whole movie here for free), and his immortal words:

I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be ever’-where – wherever you can look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise, and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.

Here in the story of a day we see those who dreamed big, worked hard, failed enormously, died unnecessarily, and simply survived. None of the principals involved in the events I mentioned knew how the day would go. Lincoln was going to a play. Those on the Titanic were on the maiden voyage of the best ship anyone could imagine. As Anne’s parents held her, they had no idea who she would grow up to be. Steinbeck warned his publisher that the book wouldn’t be popular.

And I wonder how the rest of the days might have been different had Lincoln seen the end of the play, the Titanic finished its voyage, had Anne Sullivan not been born blind, or Steinbeck given in to his skepticism about his novel. Would Lincoln have handled Reconstruction differently? What metaphor would we use for futility instead of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”? What might have happened to Helen Keller? What else would be on high school reading lists?

But they did happen. All of them. On April 14th. And they helped to make the world what it is. And on April 15th, during the last half hour of a quieter than usual night at the restaurant, Ginger and Cherry came to dinner and Abel and I came out from the kitchen and sat with them, along with a couple of the servers, and we talked and laughed and learned a little more about each other. Our little gathering will never make The Writer’s Almanac list, but it will take its place, adding to the metaphor of time as a mosaic, each small glistening moment essential to the bigger picture.

Peace,
Milton

Yesterday, Ginger, Cherry, and I took part in an “urban hike” through our neighborhood of Old West Durham to learn our way around a bit more and to learn some of the history of our neighborhood. John Schelp, the president of our neighborhood association, led the hike and dispersed the information. He did an amazing job of mixing old stories and facts with architectural notes about some of the houses and discussing current issues for our neighborhood. I learned, for instance, that John Loudermilk, who wrote “Tobacco Road,” was born in a house that stood at the end of our block, that Duke Tobacco was the only tobacco company in America before the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the dry cleaning industry grew out of the demise of icehouses. The tour led me back to the OWNDA website, where I found this quote:

For each home ground we need new maps, living maps, stories and poems, photographs and paintings, essays and songs. We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart.
— Scott Russell Sanders

Some years ago (OK, many years ago), Skip Waterbury, the senior pastor at the church in Winchester, preached a sermon on the first sentence of the Gospel of Mark: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Actually, the point of his sermon was that those words were not the first sentence but more like a title for the whole document. Jesus’ life was the beginning of his gospel and we continue it. Or not.

In the middle of a wonderful Easter service today, both Scott and Skip joined me in worship as we sang the second verse to Charles Wesley’s wonderful Resurrection hymn, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.”

Love’s redeeming work is done, alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, alleluia!

Ginger will be the first to tell you I am not a fan of altering hymn lyrics, even though it is quite fashionable for hymnal committees to do so (and most of the changes read like poetry written by committee). Still, as we sang those words I wanted to change them because, even as much as Jesus’ Resurrection cosmically changes things, Love’s redeeming work was not done that first Easter morning. Even Jesus wasn’t finished yet. And I thought of Skip’s take on Mark and then rewrote the line in my head:

Love’s redeeming work’s begun, alleluia!

Of course, my lyric shows the danger of playing with hymn texts because Love’s redeeming work began long before Jesus, going back to, well, “In the beginning, God . . .” I will, however, leave that tangent for another post. Tonight, I’m sticking with my words and how they call me to see myself – to see all of us – as participants in Love’s redeeming work on both sides of the equation. Like Russell said, we need new maps and stories, new art and action, that “we may dwell in our place with a full heart.”

At our sunrise service this morning, we sang:

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me

If Love’s redeeming work were done, there would be no need for such a prayer. But Jesus started it and then left us here in the ‘hood to draw new maps, build new homes, write new hymns (!), and redeem one another, even as we are redeemed. Celebrating the Resurrection is not merely celebrating a done deal but opening our hearts to brought back to life everyday. In the face of all there is in the world that says death is the final word and violence is what humans instinctively do to one another, we are called to bring God’s redeeming word of Love.

Love is the last word, not death.

Yet we are far from the last word and need to remember that from now until then Love is the word. We are called to love the world right down to those people we look in the eye everyday. Christ the Lord is risen today, which means we must commit ourselves to beginning Love’s redeeming work once again.

Alleluia.

Peace,
Milton

P.S. – Thus endeth this year’s Lenten Journal. I’m taking tomorrow off.

I was one of the first to the farmer’s market
this morning, determined to buy tomato
plants before my day caught up with me.

I was looking for heirlooms – seeds passed
down from grower to grower, generation
to generation, like stories worth repeating.

Most have names like Mortgage Lifter or Dad’s
Orange, but between the Black Cherry and
the Cherokee Purple, I found someone

I was not expecting to find: Paul Robeson.
Last I heard he was an opera singer and activist
who went to Russia and talked about equality,

and they (not the Russians) watched
his every move until his health gave way
and he fell under the weight of the surveillance.

I set my plant to stand in broad daylight
while I wait for it to offer a hint of how
a simple fruit carries such a complicated name

Peace,
Milton

We have a fair number of pieces of furniture in our house that have come from those stores that provide the experience of allowing me to assemble the furniture once we get the box home. The furniture is usually made in Indonesia or Thailand, comes with instructions that are illustration than illumination, and involve the use of an Allen wrench. Today, it was a chest of drawers, which meant I put together each of the six drawers and then the frame that would hold them. When I got through, the chest was sturdy, looked like it was supposed to look, and I had a handful of screws, washers, and tiny wooden dowels left over. Though I knew I had put the thing together well and that they probably sent extra stuff just in case, I couldn’t help but second guess myself and wonder what I missed because there is a certain level of precision necessary for the chest to be usable. Then I imagined some underpaid assembly line worker in Indonesia smiling to himself (more probably herself) at the thought of my bewilderment.

I smiled, too and decided what mattered was we had a chest of drawers that worked.

Tonight, I started reading Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work by Gary Alan Fine, a book I picked up simply because I’ve never seen a sociological study of my workplace and it looked interesting. It is. He begins by talking about the pace of the kitchen line during service and the necessity for good preparation

The challenge of cooking (and much work) is less what is done than the relationship among acts . . . The nearly impossible is routine because cooks are experienced enough to adjust their speed and sequencing to meet demands of the arc of work – the totality of tasks . . . Cooking under pressure demands attention to an internal agenda. (21-22)

He went on to define three ways that cooks get the job done under pressure: approximations (techniques that “defy the primacy of formal rules”), shortcuts (“improper” that bend or break the rules), and tricks of the trade (contained within the boundaries of the occupation as “subcultural knowledge”). As he continued describing approximations, Fine talked about the idiosyncratic changes in a recipe from one batch to the next is not discernable to most customers.

The evanescent character of cooking, distinguishing it from most other arts that are either material or can be captured in written, auditory, or visual record, allows for imprecision that is not possible elsewhere. Memory is a capricious judge.

That I spend my days in the kitchen rather than the woodshop makes it no surprise that cooking is a more accessible metaphor than carpentry, so I’ve been intrigued with the thought of approximations, shortcuts, and tricks of the trade being part of the way we put our lives together. I understand Fine’s distinctions between the three in this way:

• approximation: what we have to change when we don’t have everything we need to accomplish what we need to do;
• short cut: what we do when we allow ourselves to believe the end justifies the means;
• tricks of the trade: the things we’ve handed down about how to get through this thing we call life

I find it interesting that he lists all three as if equal (or at least I read it that way) and yet only two of them feel legitimate to me. Life lived well relies on intentionality more than precision, so there is room for approximating and knowledge passed along, but there’s not room for shortcuts because they undermine our integrity. Some things you just have to do.

One of the most intriguing details around Jesus’ death is what happens to the disciples. They were, understandably, grief stricken and scared. They didn’t know Easter Sunday was only a couple of days away. So they went back to their old jobs: they went fishing. In the face of their despair, they leaned into their muscle memory, to the things their bodies could do without thinking, got in their boats and went back to their old jobs. They were not prepared for the change of circumstance and had little, if anything at all, to lean into as far as precedent. They had hung their lives on Jesus’ words and actions and he was dead. They were left with handfuls of pieces that didn’t fit anywhere and, as far as anything they had built, they only had each other.

As we mark these days when Jesus lay dead, it seems we, like the disciples and the cooks Fine describes, have to come to terms with “the relationship among acts” and how we move from the shadow of the Cross to being Resurrection People. In faith, too, we are faced with the prospects of accommodations, short cuts, and tricks of the trade, with much the same consequences I described earlier. There are no shortcuts from Friday to Sunday that are worthy of making. Our faith has been handed down to us in the sharing of Communion and the singing of hymns, in the smiles and hugs and words exchanged in parish halls and parking lots. We live lives of accommodation because we live our faith out in relationship to God and to one another. That we gather together in these days to await the Resurrection in the face of a world that knows mostly of death, well, sometimes it causes me to tremble.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve never really gotten foot washing.

When I was a youth minister in Texas, we had a foot washing service one Maundy Thursday and it was solemn and thoughtful and meaningful and, well, what I can say is I got more out of washing than being washed. Then again, I’m not one for having my feet handled. But the experience has stuck with me beyond my bewilderment because of the way our pastor introduced the ritual, quoting John 3: 3-5 –

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

The trajectory of Jesus’ resolve and compassion is what grabs me: knowing that he had come from God and was going to God, he washed the feet of his disciples, who lived in a world with dirt roads and open-toed sandals: a world of filthy feet. Jesus’ action was not quaint or ceremonial; he wasn’t going for brownie points here. He was doing something few people would do as a way to show his love because he knew from whom he had come and to whom he was going, which gave him all the time and presence he needed to incarnate his love to his loved ones in the most practical way possible, even on the night before his death.

And the practicality of his incarnation of love is what grabs me. It’s not the foot washing for foot washing’s sake; it’s remembering where we’ve been (with God) and where we’re going (to God) with such tenacity as to make us aware and able to love so viscerally, so practically, that what we do to show our love meets that kind of basic-barefoot-in-the-dirt kind of need.

I mostly stumble into those moments.

Tony, our dishwasher, is very new to the US and speaks very limited English. He works hard and he wants to learn because, if we’re talking trajectories, the way out of the dish room is to learn to cook. Abel, who is Guatemalan and can speak well to both Tony and me, has been teaching Tony on the nights they work together and Tony can now cook all the sauté dishes, and cook them well. Last week on a busy night when Abel was not working and Tony was left on the line with two English speakers, he had four or five pans of rosemary pasta going and we were running out of pasta bowls because he was up on the line cooking (where we desperately needed him to be) and not washing the dishes. I didn’t have tickets on my station at that point, so, rather than take over for Tony so he could wash dishes, I went and washed them myself – about three loads, which was enough pasta bowls to keep us going. I was busy washing and didn’t realize they had caught up on the line and Tony was back with me. When I looked up, he was grinning from ear to ear and he said, “Tank you, Miton. Tank you.”

Only then did I realize what I had done. For Tony, it was washing dishes rather than feet that let him know I was with him, that I cared, that I understood how hard he was working, that I knew he, too, had come from God and was going to God. But I can learn. I am intentionally going back to wash when I can. He smiles and “tanks” me every time. Maybe you can teach an old dog new grace.

If we come from God and are going to God, then we began this journey with the very same boundless love and grace that we well find at the end, and that walked with us the whole way. There’s no race to run, nothing to earn or prove. As I’ve said before (mostly so I will hear it again):

we are loved, we are loved, we are really loved

If we are going to end up with the One who begat us all, then this life is not about progress, but about passion and compassion, about loving one another at street level where the roads are dirt and we’re all sockless. And it’s about opening our eyes and hearts that we might do more than stumble into sacredness, but we might, as Jesus did, do what we do on purpose.

I’m grateful I have a dish machine to remind me of the lesson I need to learn and relearn. And a smiling dishwasher who could use a hand.

Oh – and this song from Victoria Williams, passed on to me long ago from a friend with whom I’ve been traveling this circle for a long time.

Peace,
Milton

I realize my posts have leaned heavily towards the poetic, over the past several days in particular. Yes, it is National Poetry Month, but that’s not the reason. Part of the reason is it’s easily eleven-thirty before I even begin to write at night and I am finding it increasingly challenging to stay up long enough for a thousand coherent words to show up. Part of it is I’m being fed by reading and writing poetry these days. So here, in the dregs of my day, is tonight’s offering.

holy week

is slipping by
while I’m at work
(so are a lot of things)
and I wonder how it felt
the first time around
looking for donkeys
and upper rooms
holy errands, yes but
still things to do
by the time they sat
down for dinner
thursday evening
I wonder how much
they spent talking shop
until Jesus took the bread
and broke the whole
thing wide open

or perhaps it’s just
what I hope will
happen to me

Peace,
Milton

sit long enough in the dark
of the theater, and the credits will
roll down far enough to name

man on corner

who was only on camera for a
moment, or perhaps a line,
moving the tale from here to there

there was one in my story today

he stood in the dark on ninth street
waiting for the light to change;
I drove past and we waved

OK – it was the guy head bob thing

and I came home to find
my wife and stereo schnauzers
and promises to keep

and he walked out of my story

and on into the night,
and the darkness that tells his
story, of which one credit reads

man in jeep.

Peace,
Milton

We stood in a circle
in the sunshine on the
patio where we had waved
palm fronds barely an hour
before; now we were sharing
bread and wine, basking
in the brilliant spring shine,
our solemn ritual exposed,
on purpose, made public,
taken outdoors, alive;
our ministers in stoles
and sunglasses.

The future’s so sacred,
we gotta wear shades.

Peace,
Milton

Time like an ever-rolling stream
bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the opening day.
(Isaac Watts)

Let’s go Red Sox!

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — and of course, Opening Day has been postponed due to inclement weather; after all, it is April in Boston.

I have great news: my friend, Nathan Brown, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry with his latest book, Two Tables Over. I know. The sentence begs a couple of questions:

• They have poets in Oklahoma?
• They give them awards?

The answer to both questions is yes. Poetry does come out of Oklahoma, and it’s good. Nathan is a determined and gifted person who works hard at his craft and has a great deal to say. I quoted one of his poems a couple of days ago. Here’s another of my favorites from his new book.

Taking it Back

They stand there flash shocked
in a black and white photograph
right beneath the caption:
55 Years Perfect Attendance.

Turns out to be for Sunday School.

His hand barely touches the back
of her arm. They’re both
uncomfortable with the contact.

Tiny, frightened eyes panic
behind big bifocal lenses.
They’re thinkin’ about the drive home
in front of a dirt road dust cloud
that will eventually settle somewhere
far to the east on the grassy plain.

And, you know?

I was going to wind this down
to a great, sarcastic finish . . .
something to do with religion.

But, honestly, I’m touched by such
commitment. People like this actually
still exist. And there’s something
I know I should be grateful for
in the way they balance out
a world gone mostly mad.

Treat yourself to a volume of Nathan’s poetry (he has five). You will find something to feed your heart and you will help him pay some bills. Turns out, though the Oklahoma Book Award is a great honor, it doesn’t come with much of a cash prize.

Peace,
Milton