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advent journal: teach me to pray

8

In front of our church is a brick courtyard and over to one side stands a row of hand painted rocks, each one holding a phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, thanks to our children. The tradition here, during worship, is for the children to lead the congregation in the Prayer at the end of the Children’s Sermon. Noticing that connection makes we wonder if I think too much and trust too little. Still, I find deep resonance in the disciples’ request of Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray.”

When Jesus answered, I’m not sure he imagined we would be quoting the exact prayer every week in worship. Like any of our rituals, it can become overly fraught with familiarity or it can be an experience of revelatory repetition. For most of us on any given Sunday, it probably falls somewhere in between because prayer is hard to comprehend.

Here’s where I get caught. We still own a house in Massachusetts (yes, I believe I’ve mentioned that) and we’re trying to figure out how to get settled here. We need to sell our house up north in order to begin to plant roots here in the south. We haven’t had one offer on the house since it went on the market last August. I have prayed for the house to sell and I don’t really think God is a real estate agent. I think my life is shot through with God’s presence (as is all of creation) and I don’t always understand what that means. There are people who pray better than I who have lost their homes in this mortgage mess. If someone calls tomorrow and offers to buy our house and I attribute it as an answer to prayer, does that not imply, intentionally or not, that God somehow picked me over them?

I wish I knew what happened when I pray.

Luke records Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ request as brief and straightforward:

So Jesus told them, “Pray in this way:

‘Father, help us to honor your name.
Come and set up your kingdom.

Give us each day the food we need.

Forgive our sins as we forgive everyone who has done wrong to us.

And keep us from being tempted.’ “

(Contemporary English Version)

I’m struck by the verbs in the prayer: help, come, set up, give, forgive, keep. They are all pointed at asking God to be, well, God. That helps me. I remember hearing Clyde Fant preach many years ago about the two most important statements the disciples made. The first was in response to Jesus asking who they thought he was:

“You are the Christ,” they answered.

The second statement was one the disciples made about themselves in a moment of conscious vulnerability:

“We are but human.”

If my prayer is for God to be God, then the first thing I’m letting go is my claim to that title. There’s also a second thing. I’m praying, implicitly or explicitly, for me to be, well, me. Regardless of the circumstances that swirl around me, I’m praying to be and to become the person I was created to be, which I think is another way of saying I’m praying to be faithful. It’s less about God fixing my stuff than it is about me retaining some sense of my place in this world. If God were in the wish granting business, I would like to go back and live the last seven years without having to live with depression. What I can see looking back is God never quit being God and I learned how to be someone who found God’s love runs deeper than my sense of worthlessness, which has helped me be a better me, a healthier me, and I hope a more faithful me.

When our house sells, someone will say, “God answers prayers,” which is a true statement. But I’m not praying for the house to sell. I am asking for wisdom to make sound choices in complicated times. I’m asking for patience and perspective enough to understand our world is not coming to an end because of the pressure we feel right now. I’m praying to remember the Lord is blessing me right now. I’m praying for eyes to see and ears to hear. I’m praying to be faithful. Jesus said God sees the sparrow fall; Jesus never said anything about God catching the sparrow.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes –

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: many happy returns

8

Growing up in Africa meant growing up with a number of British friends whose traditional birthday greeting was, “Many happy returns.” I was never really sure what it meant other than I was pretty sure they were wishing me a happy birthday. Tonight I learned it means, “Have many more happy days, especially birthdays.” I also found

Since the 18th century this has been used as a salutation to offer the hope that a happy day being marked would recur many more times. It is now primarily used on birthdays; prior to the mid 19th century it was used more generally, at any celebratory or festive event.

My morning started with a stunning spousal rendition of “Happy Birthday” followed by breakfast and cards. Ginger’s had this wonderful picture on the front

and the caption: “Does this hat make me look fat?”

She had a couple of things to do at the office and then we were meeting at the church to go lunch. My birthday traditions include doing something I’ve never done before (check: I’ve never had a birthday in Durham before) and eating in an ethnic restaurant that is new to me (check: she took me to the Palace International, an African restaurant – more later). When I got to church, the woman filling in for our office manager who is on vacation handed me a card from the Church Auxiliary which said:

The Lord is blessing you right now.

Forget wishes, man, let’s go straight for emphatic claims. I loved it. I needed it. I’m hanging on to that card. I may even carry it with me so the next time things get a little tense I can read it to myself or, better yet, pull it out and show it to whoever is the stress distributor and say, “Back off, man, I’m being blessed.”

The Palace was a small, bright, and sparsely decorated room with one server whose smile sparkled as much as the sunshine that poured in through the windows. Her accent was one of the happy returns of my day, taking me back to the familiar voices of my childhood. I asked to go there because I passed it the other day and saw a photo in the window with a caption that read, “Come taste our world famous samosas.” They were the first thing I ordered and became my second return: samosas were street food when I was in Nairobi. I loved them. (I posted my recipe here.) The ones at the Palace did not disappoint. I may have to go back in, like Buddy the Elf, and say, “Congratulations on having world famous samosas.”

We meandered through the afternoon and a couple of Durham neighborhoods looking at houses to see if we can get a sense of where we will live once we can sell our house in Marshfield (doesn’t anyone out there want to buy a house six hundred feet from Cape Cod Bay?) and move out of our rental. We are beginning to learn street names and are a little more able to understand how neighborhoods connect to each other, but there is still much to learn. We returned home so Ginger could drop me off and go to one short meeting at church and then she came back around seven so we could go to dinner. Though the restaurant was new to us, the event was yet another return because dear friends in Marshfield gave us the gift certificate to the Magnolia Grill before we left Massachusetts; it was fun to feel them at dinner with us, though I wouldn’t have been willing to share much of my wonderful food:

Grilled Georgia Quail on Butternut Risotto with Hedgehog Mushrooms, Overnight Tomatoes, and Pomegranate Molasses Jus

Chesapeake Bay Wild Striped Bass with Sneed’s Perry Littleneck Clam “Chowder,” Organic Kennebec Potatoes, Roasted Pepper, Spanish Chorizo, and Squash Ragout

Manchego Crème Brulee with a Sweet Spanish Olive Oil Crisp and Poached Quince

The food tasted as amazing as the text feels intimidating. I felt the blessing of the Lord with every bite.

Throughout the day, my mobile phone would ring and someone on the other end would begin singing. Their voices full of celebration and remembrances were carried by that familiar melody of return. It was not until I got home, though, that I realized I had voice mail and got to hear my brother, sister-in-law, and oldest nephew sing to me in the same fashion as they do each year. The best was I can describe it is to say I picture them getting in the car together, driving to a drug-infested neighborhood, buying some crack, taking it together as a family, and then calling me and singing. This year, they each sang different songs at the same time, best I could tell. The sheer lunacy of the whole enterprise makes me feel loved.

After dinner, Ginger and I returned home, or what passes for home right now. It’s home to me because I return to her. What I see from this side of her amazing eyes is God is truly blessing me right now and returns over and over to do it again and again just because I’m at home with her. Very little feels settled, I feel a few dark clouds on the horizon, and we are walking much like the Magi with only a little light to guide us, and – and we keep returning to each other day after day after day: many happy returns.

Yes, the Lord is blessing me right now.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: nouvelle cuisine

1

Today was my first day cooking at the new restaurant. I did well and the learning curve was pretty steep. Thinking about my day, particularly in the context of these days of waiting and watching, led me to this poem.

nouvelle cuisine

I’m standing at the stove, staring into the sizzle,
waiting for the right time to turn the salmon.
The exercise is not new, but the kitchen is.
My mind tosses about like fish in the skillet,
wondering how context changes character,
what it means that I’m playing a new room.
I’m being me yet I have to wait to be recognized.

Jesus was cooking fish on the shores of Galilee
the morning Peter recognized the cook
and dove into the water to get to breakfast.
He walked the Emmaus road – Jesus, that is,
but no one recognized him until he broke the bread.
Not exactly cooking, but food let them see who he was.
That’s about as far as I can push the analogy except

to say I want to be known in the broiling and breaking,
to be seen in the motions of memory and making.
A day will come (will it?) when I grab the baby bok choi
out of the walk-in without asking someone where it is,
and in a moment no one else will probably notice,
I will feel recognized and received. For now I’ll cook
and wait for home to burn its way into my heart.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: rice and revolution

5

Apropos of nothing, I want to point you to an interesting web site I found through Africa Kid and the World: Free Rice. As a former English teacher, a lover of language, and someone who wants to do something about hunger in our world, I love this site. Every time you match the given word with the correct definition, you “earn” twenty grains of rice to be given to hungry people around the world. (The site is for real; the food actually gets to people.) Please make it a part of what you do.

My new Chef is an excellent entrepreneur. She began here in Durham with a catering company, which has continued to grow, has the new restaurant where I have been working, and also runs a restaurant on the Duke campus for faculty during the day and students at night. That’s where she sent me to work this evening and said, “I want to know everything you think about the place when I see you tomorrow.”

The kitchen is huge, the staff is small, and they do pretty good stuff. I liked the people I worked with, I had a good evening working there, and something wasn’t quite right. I thought about it driving home, thought about it some more in the shower, talked with Ginger a bit when I got here, and decided before I tell Chef my observations and evaluations, I need to ask a question: “What are we trying to achieve there?”

The things I noticed had to do with making things better: better organization, better kitchen setup, better menu planning – all of which would help increase business. They do a good job; I think it could be a great place. But what I may not know is the university may just be paying for a good place. If so, everyone may be helping to create exactly what they had in mind. If so, talking about how things could change is not necessarily helpful; if not, I’ve got some ideas.

When I taught high school English, I intentionally chose texts I hoped would be incendiary in class. I wanted the students to be changed by the texts, to ask uncomfortable questions, to drive their parents crazy, and to grow up to be wonderfully outlandish adults. What I learned in high school the second time around was mine was the minority opinion. Our schools are designed, for the most part, to raise good workers and good citizens, people who will mow their lawns and pay their taxes. Not too many folks are saying they want a revolution (even though most of the parents have Beatles albums).

Michael Foucault looked at prisons and schools as case studies to analyze the point or goal of society. Smith paraphrases him: “The disciplinary society forms individuals into what it wants them to be: docile, productive consumers who are obedient to the state” (92). Without going on another quoting rampage, Smith’s analysis of Foucault’s theory as it relates to the church led me to the same question I want to ask about the campus restaurant: what are we trying to achieve here?

In most every church I have been a part of, regardless of denomination, I’ve met people with young children who have joined the church – usually come back to the church after some period of absence – because “they want their children to go to be in Sunday School.” I’ve always thought it would be rude on my part to respond by asking, “Why?” so I haven’t, but I do wonder. Do they mean they want them to learn basic values so they will know how to be “good” people? How would they have felt if I had said, “Great!” and handed them this quote from Brian MacLaren:

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative . . . If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo. (Smith 21)

Status quo is Latin for you and me.

When I was a youth minister back in the day, as you kids say, I planned a mission trip to Uptown Baptist Church in Chicago. One of the most active kids in the group came and told me, in tears, that her parents would not let her go. Both of them were deacons and very active in the church. I told her I would talk to them. When I approached the father, he said he wasn’t sure it would be safe. I gave him my stock answer in those situations: every year we took a ski trip and I took forty young people, tied long pieces of fiber glass to their feet and threw them up on the side of a mountain. Never once did I have a parent question if they were safe. How could a mission trip we were going to spend in a church, when his daughter would literally almost never be alone or out of sight of an adult be more dangerous. His shoulders dropped and he said,

“I’m afraid if she goes up there and sees what is going on she won’t want to come back.” She didn’t get to go. She became a missionary.

Her parents were good people, just like the folks in the kitchen tonight are good people, and the school teachers, and the young parents returning to church. Hell, we’re all good people. I’m just not sure God’s point in breathing us into existence was for us to be good. We were created in God’s image to incarnate God’s liberating love and grace to the world around us, which means we are left with a bunch of questions, as I wrote about in a short column for our church newsletter:

The backdrop to Jesus’ birth was an occupied land in turmoil. The world was troubled and uneasy, and yet the angels came and sang about peace on earth. But how do we find peace?

How do we make sense and meaning out of our lives when most of the world is poorer, sicker, hungrier, and more frightened than we are? How do we focus on our families and the relationships that sustain us and find time and love to share with people in Iran and Indonesia? How do we invest ourselves in our local churches to do what it takes for us to become who God is calling us to be and find time and energy to generate hope and change in places like Darfur? How do we fight the good fights that need to be fought on our local levels to make sure our towns and cities are caring for our citizens and find energy and determination to bang our heads against the brick wall that is our national government to hold them accountable for their lack of coherent leadership? How do we save the whales, save the rainforest, stop human trafficking, feed the hungry, house the homeless, wage peace, demand equality, struggle with our own biases, cook dinner, get the kids to soccer practice, pay the bills, love our significant others, meet new people, care for our friends, take care of our bodies, get enough sleep, stay informed, have some fun, do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God?

I’m not going to answer those questions, by the way, I’m just throwing them out there.

We are waiting expectantly for the Birth, the Incarnation, the Sacred Scandal, the God’s release of Unadulterated, Undiluted, Unfiltered Love into the world. God call to us in this season is to be prepared: if we go to Bethlehem open-hearted, we won’t want to come back, or at least we won’t want to come back the same.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — I have a short book review published here.

advent journal: can we go caroling?

6

I didn’t grow up observing Advent, only Christmas. Even then the time was short: I have a December birthday, so my mother made a point not to put up the decorations until after my birth had been duly celebrated; my father liked the decorations to come down the day after Christmas, so the whole thing lasted about two weeks at our house. Short and sweet. As far as church went, no Advent observance meant December was the Christmas season, every service filled with carols as we worked our way to the manger.

My first real experience with Advent was through Episcopal friends when I was living in Fort Worth. One was the youth minister at the nearest Episcopal church and the other was one of the young people in my youth group who was from an Episcopal family. I remember going to the midnight service on Christmas Eve at All Saints Episcopal Church, with all the smells and bells, and being seated on the aisle at the exact point where the young man with the big ball of incense took it full circle and gave me a snoot full of scented smoke. I sneezed and cried the rest of the service. I’ve been an Advent fan ever since.

I love the intentional preparation, the meaningful repetition of the rituals, the lighting of the candles, all of it. And I sorely miss the Christmas carols. I know we get to sing them during Christmastide as we wait for the wise men to finally make it across the desert, but I miss singing them now, while we are waiting. I miss them because those songs are a good bit of what helps me to prepare, rather than just wait, and I feel like we’re unwittingly giving over the Christmas music to the malls and radio stations since we aren’t singing them in worship. I need someone other than Karen Carpenter to get me to Christmas.

greeting cards have all been sent
the Christmas rush is through
I just have one wish to make
a special one for you . . .

One of the things we have not done yet in our new place is put up a tree. We, like Mary and Joseph, I suppose, are in transition. We are renting a house here waiting for someone to buy or rent our house back in Marshfield so we can find our way to more permanent housing after the first of the year. We’ve worked hard to only unpack the basic things we need since we are going to have to repack it all in the Pod to move it to wherever it goes next. When we were filling it up in Massachusetts, we worked hard to pack in an order that would let us get to our most necessary things and our Christmas decorations were some of those essentials. When we got home from church this afternoon, I said to Ginger, “I’m going to find a tree. I can’t go any longer without a tree.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I can’t either.

Neither of us last long, sinus wise, in a house with a real tree, so I headed for the various big box stores around us to find an artificial one since we gave the our old one to the Marshfield Church before we left. I really haven’t been in stores much this season (I’m an online shopper) and was quite startled by the crowds and parking difficulties on a Sunday afternoon. I finally found our tree (pre-lit!) and assembled it in the living room in front of the window so our neighbors could see we were into the swing of the season. The lights have a built in twinkle to them and they warm up the house quite nicely. The will burn from now until the Magi arrive.

As I went about my Christmas tasks, I kept thinking about carols. As I put up the tree, I opened iTunes to see what Christmas music I had since the Christmas CDs are still in the Pod somewhere. The only full album I had was Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas. Just before the end of the record, he started to sing my favorite:

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth,
To touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, goodwill to men,
From heaven’s all-gracious King.”
The world in solemn stillness lay,
To hear the angels sing.

I know one of the reasons I find such meaning in the carol is the images of darkness juxtaposed with hope have been deeply resonant as I have learned to live with depression. The song speaks, for me, to what I want to happen in and to my heart during Advent.

Still through the cloven skies they come,
With peaceful wings unfurled,
And still their heavenly music floats
O’er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains,
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever o’er its Babel sounds
The blessèd angels sing.

I did learn there is a verse that is omitted from most hymnals that would be worth singing this year. at least.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

One verse, in particular, touches me the most.

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,

Who toil along the climbing way

With painful steps and slow,

Look now! for glad and golden hours

come swiftly on the wing.

O rest beside the weary road,

And hear the angels sing!

How can we wait to sing these words? How can we keep from singing? We know the song we all need to hear.

For lo!, the days are hastening on,
By prophet bards foretold,
When with the ever-encircling years
Comes round the age of gold
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.

I can wait for Christmas, but I need to sing now. Can’t we start caroling?

Peace,
Milton
P. S. – I couldn’t find Cockburn’s version to share, but here is a beautiful offering by Catie Curtis.

advent journal: what I remember

5

A new acquaintance opened a door to some old memories for me this evening.

Thanks to the connections at CCBlogs, I found Peculiar Preacher, who turns out to be someone with whom I probably share any number of mutual friends since we both attended Baylor and spent a good deal of time in Texas. He wrote about going to see a new production of Man of La Mancha in Fort Worth and his dissent with the area theater critics about the quality and impact of the production.

My family was traveling between Africa and America (my parents were missionaries) in 1967 or 68 and we stopped in London for a couple of days to rest. My parents took my brother and me to see Man of La Mancha and we saw a rather legendary performance (I know now). It was the first time I had ever been to a stage production of that magnitude and quality. I was mesmerized by the experience and moved by the story. The Cervantes/Quixote character burrowed deep into my young heart and has never forsaken his residence there. I remember hearing “The Impossible Dream” before it became a lounge lizard anthem:

and the world will be better for this
that one man torn and covered with scars
still strove with his last ounce of courage
to reach the unreachable star

It’s hard to get a clean hearing of the song now.

My favorite character in the show was not Quixote, but Sancho Panza, his sidekick. In one of the final scenes, Quixote is dying and has allowed himself to believe his life has been a failure. Sancho refuses for that to be the last word. He begins to sing to the song to his dear friend and master, saying, “Don’t you remember? You must remember.” Quixote then revives to sing with his companion once more and then dies without taking the sense of failure with him. Such is the power of friendship.

I find myself in both men. I understand Quixote’s feelings of worthlessness when he is told his life has counted for nothing but tilting at windmills. Yes, I know the last sentence is a bit overly dramatic and I don’t know another way to say it. Part of what it has meant to be Milton over the years is feeling less than enough and always at least an arm’s length from whatever the dream might be. Those feelings didn’t consume all of my days, but they have been part of the package. I think those feelings have led me to live a lot like Sancho: I’m a good sidekick. I like being able to help those around me reach for their stars, feel like enough in their story, or simply live through to the other side of failure. Somewhere in the interchange, I get to feel like I’m enough as well.

Since I worked brunch today, Ginger and I both got to be home together tonight, each at our respective MacBooks writing away. I plugged the speakers into mine and turned on Gavin Bryars’ recording, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which is a classical piece built around the singing of a London street person. Here is Bryars’ description:

In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song – sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads – and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet”. This was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one.

When I played it at home, I found that his singing was in tune with my piano, and I improvised a simple accompaniment. I noticed, too, that the first section of the song – 13 bars in length – formed an effective loop which repeated in a slightly unpredictable way. I took the tape loop to Leicester, where I was working in the Fine Art Department, and copied the loop onto a continuous reel of tape, thinking about perhaps adding an orchestrated accompaniment to this. The door of the recording room opened on to one of the large painting studios and I left the tape copying, with the door open, while I went to have a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping.

I was puzzled until I realized that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man’s singing. This convinced me of the emotional power of the music and of the possibilities offered by adding a simple, though gradually evolving, orchestral accompaniment that respected the tramp’s nobility and simple faith.

For all of our preparation during Advent, it’s difficult for us to access or replicate the desperation of the Incarnation on both sides of the equation. The second Broadway show I ever saw was Fiddler on the Roof. When the Russian soldiers come to tell the Jewish people they have to leave, one of them says, “Rabbi, wouldn’t this be a good time for the Messiah to come?” We tell the story and light the candles and sing the songs in ways that are meaningful and moving and full of good things, but rarely do we come to moments when we grab one another and say, “Don’t you remember? You must remember.” The divine desperation of the not-so-impossible dream that stands behind God putting skin on asks the same question: don’t you remember?

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.

A voice cries: “In the wilderness,
prepare the way of the LORD;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

A voice says, “Cry!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
“All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades
when the breath of the LORD blows on it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.”
(Isaiah 40:6-8)

We must remember.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: nothing to lose

5

When I went to work in the afternoon at the restaurant in Plymouth, I usually saw the pastry chef who did most of his work in the morning so the rest of us could have access to the prep area. He and I had worked together at another restaurant a couple of years back, so we had a good relationship and talked a lot about food. One of the comparisons I made was his job as a pastry chef was analogous to that of a scientist: he had to measure things exactly and weigh them out the same way each time in order for the tortes and tarts to come out the whey he wanted; my job as a line cook was more akin to improvisation: I knew my ingredients, I knew my kitchen, I knew the recipes – though those were given without amounts or measurements – and I responded to the tickets as they came in.

I thought about my analogy as I began working at the restaurant here in Durham: new menu, new people, new kitchen, new region – most all of it calling me to use what I know in new ways. My job for most of Wednesday night was to “run the line” or “expedite” the food, which means I took the ticket when it came in, called out what had been ordered, made sure the food went out on time, and told the food runner the table for the order and the places at each table for each plate. I had a blast. About nine-thirty, as business started to die down, we sent one of the line cooks home because he was working lunch the next day and Sous asked me to cover his station (I was going to get to cook!). At the same time, the floor manager came back and asked me to make her some dinner: “Anything you want,” she said. “I eat it all.”

I began to look around the line. I put a piece of salmon on the grill and, while it was cooking, took some of the diced roasted butternut squash we had and mixed it with some of the risotto. I also took some Brussels sprouts, maple syrup, and apple cider vinegar and fixed the little green guys my favorite way. None of what I did was on the menu, yet everything was right in front of me. The recipes came from what I already knew, but seemed new in my new environs. I didn’t make anything up, I just put the pieces I had together a bit differently. Such is the nature of improvisation.

As Wells talks about improvisation as his metaphor for Christian ethics, he says we have to get past some misconceptions about improv to make the metaphor work. Two of them are:

improvisation is about being original;
improvisation is about being witty or clever. (67)

The first thing that came to mind is my favorite piece of dialogue from the movie Fight Club:

JACK
Tyler, you are by far the most

interesting “single-serving” friend

I’ve ever met.

Tyler stares back. Jack, enjoying his own chance to be

witty, leans closer to Tyler.


JACK

You see, when you travel, everything

is small, self-contained–


TYLER

The spork. I get it. You’re very

clever.


JACK

Thank you.


TYLER

How’s that working out for you?


JACK

What?


TYLER

Being clever.


JACK

(thrown)

Well, uh… great.


TYLER

Keep it up, then. Keep it right up.

I’ve turned those two things over in my mind a great deal today because they tempt me both: I like to feel original and witty, if not clever. Smart, too. The reality is, at the point where I dropped in to human history for my few minutes, there ain’t a whole lot of original, witty, clever, smart, or even funny that hasn’t already been done and done well. The best I can hope for is to learn from those before me and maybe, every so often, reconfigure things in a way that adds to what it means to be human.

Here’s another food example, which I use only because I was so knocked out by this dish. A new friend here in Durham opened his wine bar the night after we got to town last week. We went to check it out and it’s awesome. One of the dishes he had on the menu was cinnamon-crusted scallops. I’d never heard of the combination before. As I was writing this afternoon, I typed those three words into Google and was told I could find them on at least 214,000 web pages. As my seminary preaching professor once said, “Being original means knowing how to hide your sources.”

Thinking of him brings to mind another seminary moment. A large number of those in my circle of friends there had gone to college together, which means we had stayed up late together and had gone to a lot of movies together. By the time we got to seminary, a fair amount of our conversation was communicated in movie lines. (I still work that way.) One of the new additions to our circle in seminary said to me one day, “I need you to make a list of the ten movies I need to see so I can talk to you guys.” I still know him and most of the others and we still use the same lines, with a few new ones thrown in. We’re always looking for new material.

The thing that made it so easy for me to cook for the manager the other night, more than anything else, was her saying, “I eat it all.” The pressure was off. She wasn’t testing my abilities; she wanted dinner. I know how to make a good meal, so I did. The night went well calling the tickets because the folks I was working with on both sides of the line were pulling for me. The point wasn’t to see if I was going to screw up; the point was for us to work together to get good food out to the good people who had chosen to come to our place for dinner.

Last night on Grey’s Anatomy, one of the patients asked the doctor to wait to perform a rather precarious procedure until he wasn’t scared. One of the other doctors said, “It’s good that you’re scared; it means you still have something left to lose.” The sentiment worked in that moment, but it’s not a life lesson. Our Creator, the Grand Improviser who has the corner on Clever, Original, and Everything Else all the way down to Forgiveness and Grace, has left us nothing to lose. We are loved. We are valued. We are together. We are here on the human stage for our part of the play and we know, as I have said before (and John said of Jesus before me), we have come from God and we are going to God. Like JT says:

the secret of love is in opening up your heart
it’s okay to feel afraid

but don’t let that stand in your way

‘cause anyone knows that love is the only road

and since were only here for a while

might as well show some style

give us a smile

Remember: we’re surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, not hecklers.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — I’ve posted two new recipes — here and here — and neither one is original.

advent journal: post-it-modernism

4

After rereading my first couple of posts for Advent, I called my friend Gordon to ask if they made sense. What prompted my call was his comment at the end of what was a rather heady post on my part: “REALLY looking forward to hearing about your first Sunday there.” Without assuming what I inferred was what he was necessarily implying, I took it to mean my posts were a little out of balance. Not bad or wrong; just out of balance. About half way through the post in question, I remember thinking, “This will be the place where Ginger rolls her eyes and says, ‘OK, Geek Boy, get to the point.’” I’m a better writer when I trust her instinct. (Smile.)

I started reading this morning and both my Advent books were talking about metanarratives. I sent Google looking for links and then, just for fun, I asked it to search for images and came across an old friend: Opus.

I would be the one with the eraser. (Another smile.)

I started reading my books again this morning and found the philosophical terms swirling around in my head like some sort of theological tornado. When it finally put me down, I had this image of two guys talking in what we call the Middle Ages, wondering aloud what they were in the middle of. I suppose they considered themselves contemporary and intelligent rather than stupid and stumbling around in the dark. Whatever had come before, whatever was going on in their time, and even whatever was to follow, they were a fresh as history got in their day. Their world was small by our standards, but it was the world they knew and the world to which they responded.

I find it ironically symbolic that we live in a time when Post-It® notes were invented – by accident, to boot.

Everyone knows what Post-it® notes are: They are those great little self-stick notepapers. Most people have Post-it® Notes. Most people use them. Most people love them. But Post-it® Notes were not a planned product.

No one got the idea and then stayed up nights to invent it. A man named Spencer Silver was working in the 3M research laboratories in 1970 trying to find a strong adhesive. Silver developed a new adhesive, but it was even weaker than what 3M already manufactured. It stuck to objects, but could easily be lifted off. It was super weak instead of super strong.

No one knew what to do with the stuff, but Silver didn’t discard it. Then one Sunday four years later, another 3M scientist named Arthur Fry was singing in the church’s choir. He used markers to keep his place in the hymnal, but they kept falling out of the book. Remembering Silver’s adhesive, Fry used some to coat his markers. Success! With the weak adhesive, the markers stayed in place, yet lifted off without damaging the pages. 3M began distributing Post-it ® Notes nationwide in 1980 — ten years after Silver developed the super weak adhesive. Today they are one of the most popular office products available.

The irony, for me, is we use a lot of “posts” to describe where we feel like we are in terms of history – postmodern, post-liberal, post-Christian, Post Toasties – when we, like Arthur Fry, find our place when we learn how to look at what we have around us. It’s how great recipes are born. Some of the most imaginative flavor combinations have come about not because the chef was theorizing, but because he or she was trying to work with what was already in the kitchen or connecting the dots between otherwise disparate dishes. One of my last meals in New England, I had fried calamari with cashews, grapefruit segments, diced papaya, wilted spinach, and a Thai sweet chili glaze. I’m telling you: no one built that from scratch; they found it by surprise – by improvising.

In my reading today, James Smith has been discussing Jean-Francois Lyotard’s (I think I’ll call him “Stretch” – get it: “Stretch Lyotard”?) take on postmodernism as “incredulous towards metanarratives.” Smith makes his point by quoting a scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou?

DELMAR
A miracle! It was a miracle!

EVERETT
Aw, don’t be ignorant, Delmar. I told
you they was gonna flood this valley.

DELMAR
That ain’t it!

PETE
We prayed to God and he pitied us!

EVERETT
It just never fails; once again you two
hayseeds are showin’ how much you want
for innalect. There’s a perfectly
scientific explanation for what just
happened –

PETE
That ain’t the tune you were singin’ back
there at the gallows!

EVERETT
Well any human being will cast about in a
moment of stress. No, the fact is, they’re
flooding this valley so they can hydro-
electric up the whole durned state…

Everett waxes smug:

Yessir, the South is gonna change.
Everything’s gonna be put on electricity and
run on a payin’ basis. Out with the old
spiritual mumbo-jumbo, the superstitions and
the backward ways. We’re gonna see a brave
new world where they run everyone a wire and
hook us all up to a grid. Yessir, a veritable
age of reason – like the one they had in
France – and not a moment too soon…

Everett’s take is an example of a modernist metanarratives because he assumes his “criteria of legitimation [to be] understood as standing outside of any particular language game and thus guarantee universal truth” (67). I turn to my scientist friend Randy for further clarification. He often questions the conventional wisdom, or at least the conventional media coverage, when it comes to issues of climate change. He’s not saying there is no change, he’s just saying the explanations – the legitimation – is not necessarily accurate: the metanarrative of the global warming crowd sees their perspective as universal truth rather than a narrative that requires some level of faith to believe, as do all of our stories.

We aren’t going to find a universal theory of everything that holds the universe together in an easy-to-grasp explanation anymore than Spencer Silver was able to come up with his super strong adhesive. We are Post-It notes on the pages of history, living in a world connected by hands and hearts holding on to one another, not by ideology or institutions. Whether we are pre- or post- or once again in the middle, we are a people grounded in the story of an imaginative God who breathed us into existence and calls us to incarnate what we trust to be true about the life we have been given and the world we have to share.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: back to work

9

Back in October I made a visit to Durham by myself to begin looking for a cooking job. I had the advantage of getting advice and direction from a local restaurateur who is connected with the church and knows the culinary landscape of the area very well. (He also opened his own very cool wine bar last Friday.) Other church members sent suggestions as well. I took it upon myself to be a bit of a culinary cyber detective, chasing down all sorts of links and tangents, looking for just the right place. One site I found was for a restaurant that had not even opened, yet the vibe the chef created through the web page pulled me in. By the time I made my trip they had been open a week and she was standing at the front door next to the host stand when I walked in for lunch. I talked to her for a moment, gave her my resume, ate lunch, and left to catch my plane back to Boston.

“When it gets closer to your being here, come see me,” she said.

Ginger and I came back about a month later to find a place to live. I took her to the place and, once again, Chef was standing at the front door. My gift to her this time was a copy of the menu from the place I was working in Plymouth.

“Awesome,” she said. “Let me know when you get to town.”

Last Friday — after we get into our house on Thursday – I went by the restaurant, this time to say, “I’m here.” I talked to Chef and her Sous Chef for about a half an hour and she said they wanted to look at some numbers and asked if I would come back on Tuesday, which I did. I got there yesterday afternoon and was treated to lunch (she makes killer hush puppies) and then we began talking about a job for me. I realized as she and Sous spoke, they were not speaking in theoretical terms; they were ready to hire me. Chef was talking schedule and responsibilities.

“Can you work tomorrow night?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, let me ask you this: can you come in tonight for an hour or so to see how I run the line because I have a meeting tomorrow night that I forgot about and I need someone running the line I can trust; and I can trust you.”

I’d seen this woman four times for a total of about an hour and she felt as though she could trust me. Funny thing: I felt the same way in return. I’m not sure how that works between people – the intuitive resonance – and I’m glad it does. I got to the kitchen about 6:30 last night and by 6:35 I was calling tickets and making sure the plates were going out as they should. The kitchen was new to me, the faces around me were unfamiliar, the menu was different, and I was right at home doing what I know how to do: improvisation.

I woke up this morning thinking about the progression of virtue as described by Samuel Wells: repeated practices nurture skill, skill develops habit, habit develops instinct: “a pattern of unconscious behavior that recalls a deep element of character.” Cooking is in my bones, in my DNA. I grew up in the kitchen and I’ve worked hard to hone my craft as a profession, even though I’m late to the game in many respects. I’ve got good instincts now about how to cook, how to treat the people I work with, and what it means to feed people well. So I smiled when I read this statement from a local news article about Chef:

“She wants to feed the neighborhood and everyone is important.”

I guess the trust that came so easily for both of us is evidence of a deeper resonance. I went in looking for a job and I think I’ve found a place I’m going to belong. What a gift.

About twenty minutes into my tenure last night, a ticket came through calling for one of the signature appetizers:

Zuke’s Pork Plate with house prosciutto, smoked ham, pork rilletes, and spicy chorizo served with artichoke pickles, grainy mustard, compote, and toasts

The line cook put a beautiful plate together, handed it to me, I called, “Table 13,” and handed it to the food runner. About fifteen minutes later, the server for Table 19 asked about her pork plate; I had called the wrong table, which meant one group got a free app and the other was sitting and waiting.

“Man,” I said, “I didn’t even last an hour before I started screwing up.”

“Hey,” said the server, “you lasted longer than most people.”

When the Chef came back and I told her of my mistake, she said, “Great! Now the people at Table 13 will think I’m really cool,” and she laughed.

I think this is going to be good. Stop by for dinner; we’re open late.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: “do try and keep up”

5

If you walk up Frazier Ave. between the bridges in Chattanooga’s North Shore neighborhood, you come across sidewalk sculpture like this:


Every so often, for three or four blocks, there is another dance instruction: the Waltz, the Cha-cha, the Mambo. I, of course, danced my way up the street by the time I came to the final installation:

As much fun as it was to jump around on the sidewalk, trying to follow the brass footprints, I wasn’t improvising. There’s more – much more – to improv than just doing the first thing that comes to mind or just going crazy on the street. A good improvisationalist spends a great deal of time and effort preparing.

Soon after I started writing this blog, I connected with Mark Heybo, who lives in England. He wrote a post about a group called Improv Everywhere whose mission is to create scenes of “joy and chaos” whenever they can. My favorite was an event they planned that required large groups of people, back packs, and cell phones. Three different groups of people entered a museum, one at a time, and checked their back packs as they went in, leaving their cell phones (with specific ring tones) on and in the bag. Once everyone was in the museum, three other groups of people began to dial the numbers in a very calculated fashion to create a sort of coat check symphony. Whether you see the event as creative or simply annoying to the folks who checked the bags, my point is their improvisation took a lot of planning and preparation, not to mention participation.

I could hear the ring tones as I read these words from Samuel Wells:

Ethics cannot be simply about rehearsing and repeating the same script and story over and over again, albeit on a fresh stage with new players. This does not do sufficient justice to the unfolding newness of each moment of creation. The Bible is not so much a script that the church learns and performs as it is a training school that shapes the habits and practices of a community. This community learns to take the right things for granted, and on the basis of this faithfulness, it trusts itself to improvise within its tradition. Improvisation means a community formed in the right habits trusting itself to embody its tradition in new and often challenging circumstances; and this is exactly what the church is called to do. (12)

As I was driving this morning, I heard the last bit of commentary after President Bush’s press conference today. He was talking about the new intelligence report that basically says Iran is not as dangerous as he — and others — have been saying, even intimating that “World War Three” is imminent. His response to the news was to say our foreign policy as related to Iran will not change. We’re going to keep acting, it seems, as though the old information were reliable, which means we will continue to be motivated by fear. I don’t know if he doesn’t know how to change, or if he doesn’t want to, or what is behind his recalcitrance, but he serves as a good example of what improvisation doesn’t look like.

The world is changing faster than we can understand. (I’ll bet you didn’t know that!) I live in Durham, North Carolina. Down the street from my house there is a small eight-shop strip center that is home to a Thai restaurant, an Indian grocery, an African grocery, a Chinese cooking school, and a Mediterranean delicatessen. I’m not in New York or London; I’m in Durham. I love it. And it means I’m compelled to think about life in America in new ways and do more than lament that the days of everyone looking and acting like me are over. As Steve Earle sings on his new album:

living in a city of immigrants
I don’t have to go traveling

open the door and the world walks in

living in a city of immigrants

When I lived in Dallas, there used to be a billboard on Central Expressway that someone with a sense of humor used to post pithy sayings. One of my favorites was

If you’re getting run out of town, make it look like a parade.

Such is the heart of improvisation. Wells begins his book talking about the church in its beginning years as a community of integrity, identity, and imagination:

The early church believed that its own fragile and vulnerable state was deceptive . . . They demonstrated this faith by maintaining nonviolence, the practice of confronting evil using only the weapons that Christ himself used. The early Christians also believed that they were a distinct people with a special vocation. Their form of life was dictated by no criterion other than faithfulness to Christ. Their identity was expressed in baptism. They believed their common life and servant practice were the heart of the gospel. They believed their calling was to show what kind of life was possible when communities lived in the light of God’s providence and they embodied this faith in their celebration of the Eucharist. (24-25)

They knew they weren’t in charge, or even safe, so they lived as if that was they way they intended it to be, incarnating in their own lives what they had seen in Jesus, which meant understanding authentic discipleship rarely draws rave reviews from those at the top of the heap. The “virtue” of their fellowship, as Wells describes it, finds its echo in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words about the faithful trusting that “right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”

Yesterday was our first Sunday at our new church and it was also the first Sunday of Advent and Communion Sunday. I also learned, as the children gathered at the front of the church with Carla, our associate pastor, that it was “Pennies for Hunger” day, which meant the children enthusiastically took baskets out among the congregation to collect our “pennies” for local hunger concerns. I loved the ease and comfort with which the kids moved around the sanctuary, as though it was a place they belonged – even when one of them dropped his basket of change on the floor. Someone helped him pick it up and everything was fine. I thought about the kids this morning when I read this post at Mr. Jones and Me:

Last year I met a tiny girl of three named Maeve. She was putting the final touches on an incredible sort of cabinet that was half-drawn with coloured crayons, yet some of the tiny drawers in it undid and pulled out; it was definitely magical.

I asked the child how she did it, and she grinned at me and said in a whisper, “It’s not that difficult to be magical. Do try to keep up!”

I’ve never forgotten she said that.

The folks at Pilgrim light the Advent candle at the end of the service rather than the beginning, which is a change in what I am used to. As one of the young people lighted the candle, we sang, “Peace, peace, peace,” as if it were as capable of being realized as being magical was to Maeve. She had the eye, the heart, and the vocabulary to see a world full of magic; what is our language of the heart?

Virtues are derived from repeated practices that a community continually performs because it regards them as central to its identity. Repeated practices nurture skill, an excellence that derives from repeated performance. Skill develops habit, a disposition to use skills on occasions and in locations different from the times and places where the skill was developed. Habit develops instinct, a pattern of unconscious behavior that recalls a deep element of character. This is the language of virtue. (Wells 24)

Advent is a season that calls us to rearticulate our calling, to remind ourselves to prepare and practice, to remember the body of Christ that we might be born again, afresh into a world that has long since lost sight of magic, or purpose, of peace. We are not merely waiting; we are getting ready.

Maeve’s words are prophetic: do try and keep up.

Peace,
Milton