don't eat alone

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Today is Joseph Conrad’s birthday; he’d be one hundred and fifty, if he had lived. While the significance of the date has dwindled for most, I make note because Heart of Darkness is one of my favorite books. If I were to name three books I wish were not relegated to being considered “high school reading,” such that hardly anyone reads them after surviving high school, they would be

• Heart of Darkness
• The Scarlet Letter and
• Frankenstein

Oh – and 1984. And Of Mice and Men. OK, I want you to go back and reread all of your high school literature. But that’s not my point. Besides being amazing stories, my top three were also the books in which I first began to deal with literary theory. I have editions of each one that came with critical essays in feminist theory, reader-response, and a deconstructionist approach, among others. It was then I first encountered Derrida’s statement: there is “nothing outside the text.”

I had no idea what he meant. I kept reading. I made my honors Brit Lit class (I was a high school teacher a decade ago) try to digest the essays; most of them threw up, metaphorically speaking. But we kept struggling together. I learned a great deal. I quit making them read the essays and tried to find a way to bring what I was learning from the theories into my teaching practice. What I learned that Derrida was saying (or at least saying to me) was the only way we have to communicate with others and make sense of our world is through the text: through language.

Conrad didn’t write in his native language and yet his command of English makes his prose some of the most intricate and demanding of any writer. He set up the story to show how stories get passed along. The novel begins with a narrator talking about being on a boat with Marlow, who is telling of his adventures in Africa. When Marlow begins talking, the book becomes an extended quote, if you will, framed by the narrator in the same way most of our lives are experienced as we try to come to terms with one another’s stories. We don’t live much that’s firsthand. Tonight, I want to provide the frame for extended quotes that moved me today. First from Marlow in Heart of Darkness as he distinguished the European colonial effort from the Roman conquest of Europe when it was “one of the dark places”:

What saves us is efficiency — the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force — nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind — as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea — something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . . .

It was the phrase “an unselfish belief in the idea” that tied to my second quote, from Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?:

Within the matrix of a modern Christianity, the base “ingredient” is the individual; the church, then, is simply a collection of individuals. Conceiving of Christian faith as a private affair between the individual and God . . . modern evangelicalism finds it hard to articulate just how or why the church has any role to play other than providing a place to fellowship with other individuals who have a private relationship with God. With this model in place, what matters is Christianity as a system of truth or ideas, not the church as a living community embodying its head . . . As such, Christianity becomes intellectualized rather than incarnate, commodified rather than the site of genuine community . . . The body is the New Testament’s organic model of community that counters the modernist emphasis on the individual . . . The church is the site where God renews and transforms us – a place where the practices of being the body of Christ form us into the image of the Son . . . Nothing is more countercultural than a community serving the Suffering Servant in a world devoted to consumption and violence. But the church will have the countercultural, prophetic witness only when it jettisons its own modernity; in that respect postmodernism can be another catalyst for the church to be the church. (29-30)

The catch phrase, or the phrase that caught me here, was, “the church, then, is simply a collection of individuals,” which took me back to Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps and an interview he did with a Mr. Atlas, who interpreted the word collection a bit differently:

“When I started with maps,” he added, “it was a miscellaneous assortment that had only a personal connection. I’d buy a map of a place because I’d taken a trip there or because I had relatives who lived there, something of that sort. And then after a few years I realized that really wasn’t the right way to go about it. That’s not a collection: it’s an assembly of items. And the way I draw the distinction is that selecting a piece for a collection has nothing to do with the individual merits of the item. It’s whether there’s a potential of relating it to other items. That’s what builds a collection: a sum is of greater interest than each of the individual members.” (246)

The collision of conquest, civilization, community, collection, and counter-culture (how nice of them all to alliterate) sends me to church, or at least to thinking about what it means to be the church. The last sentence of the last quote pulls me hard: a sum of greater interest than each one of the individual members. It also brings to mind a couple of stories, both old and new.

We didn’t bring much with us to Durham outside of what we packed in the Pod, which arrives tomorrow, but we did bring our Christmas decorations. Between the two of us, we have collected about seven different nativity scenes from as many different countries. I came back to the house last night to find Ginger had combined them all into one giant descent of humanity on the manger. Interspersed between the figures were the stocking holders that spell out P-E-A-C-E even as they hold the large empty socks begging for candy.

A number of years ago, when I was a seminary student, I was talking with a pastor of a small Baptist church in Houston who was working hard to grow an inclusive community and as such had spent a great deal of money making the church handicap accesible. He told me of an encounter with one of the mega church pastors, who was a friend of his, gave him some friendly advice related to efficiency and conquest, I suppose: “When handicap people start coming to your church, your church starts dying.”

Everyday since we arrived in Durham, someone has shown up at our house with food – good food. At church yesterday, I loved seeing the diversity of people that made us church, that made us far more interesting together than we were on our own.

I piled up a lot of words tonight. I think I’ll be quiet now and listen.

Peace,
Milton

Everything has a past, or at least a precursor. Before there was a blog, or even email, I wrote a Lenten Journal to a specific friend as my spiritual practice during the season. When I got an email account, I started sending it to more and more friends, mostly because I could. The email list grew, Gordon Atkinson explained what a blog was to me, and two days after Christmas two years ago, don’t eat alone was born. I’ve continued my practice of writing everyday during Lent; last year I did the same during Advent. The discipline for me is less about the frequency that it is the focus. During these two seasons, I’m intentional about choosing two or three books for the journey and using my writing more specifically as theological and devotional reflection while, hopefully, not losing sight of the things that are my usual subjects.

I started thinking about books a couple of weeks ago, though the ones I’ve chosen found me rather than me them. Over the past couple of years (mostly since I’ve been blogging), I’ve read bits and pieces about the “emergent church,” without knowing much about what it was or who was writing about it. About the time I would begin to think I had a little bit of a handle, I would find something that would make me wonder. This Advent season seemed like a good time for me to become more intentional about learning about it. Based on the buzz I’ve read, I thought I would get one of Brian McLaren’s books, since he seems to be at least one of the most prolific emergent writers. Another blog lead me to McLaren’s own site where I was a bit put off by his article against consumerism that suggested one of the ways to fight back was to buy his book and give one to a friend. (I’m not trying to pick on him; he’s certainly not alone. Springsteen’s first single off his new album is called “Radio Nowhere,” decrying the loss of local radio and everything else, yet his website announces a satellite radio station; the Eagles’ new CD, full of protests against globalism and capitalism run amok was available exclusively at Wal-Mart in its initial release.)

About the same time, Ginger received an email note inviting her to hear Samuel Wells speak on his book, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. The connections made in the title intrigued me and I decided to let McLaren wait for another day. I wanted one more book and let Amazon do some searching for “emergent”; they provided me with Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church by James K. A. Smith. I punched a couple of buttons and both books showed up at our new house on Friday. The third book for the journey (one for each of the Magi?) is one I’m rereading: David Jensen’s In the Company of Others: a Dialogical Chistology.

An Advent season doesn’t pass that I don’t go back to Meister Eckhart’s words:

What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago and I do not give birth to the son of God in my time and in my culture?

Neither does an Advent season pass that I am not aware of the difference in giving birth and using birth as a metaphor, whatever the discussion. I’m a straight white male who has no idea what it feels like to have your body writhe and clench and ache, or for a new life to come bursting out of your belly. Several years ago, when our first godchild was about to be born, we were in the hospital with the mother to be. The nurse walked in and said to her, “It’s about time to herniate you membrane.” As I stood up to leave, the nurse assured me I could stay.

“Oh, no,” I said, “I make it a point to leave the room anytime someone says, ‘It’s time to herniate your membrane.’”

I will be the first, therefore, to say I am not an expert on childbirth, postmodernism, literary theory, the emergent movement, or theology, for that matter. My hope is my journey through the season is kin to the shepherds following the angel chorus, or the magi chasing the star: I’m just trying to get to the manger in my time and in my culture, which means, for me, it’s time to break some stained glass and let some different light seep into what has become an all too sanctified barn.

Yesterday morning my phone rang and the voice on the other end identified herself as someone who reads this blog and lives here in Durham. She called to invite me to a lecture on Sacred Harp shaped note singing and, she hoped, some singing as well. I drove to the Watts Street Baptist Church where the event was to take place. When I walked into the foyer of the church, there was a poster delineating some of the highlights in the church’s history, one of which was it was the first Southern Baptist church to ordain a woman in 1964 (four years after it integrated). As I read a little more about the church, I realized they, like me, had Southern Baptist roots that had sprouted into a tree of a different sort, if you will. As I said, everything has a past.

Shaped note singing was designed to do at least two things: one was to help people learn to sight read without having to read music. The shapes on the scale helped the singers learn the notes. The second thing was it was designed to be participatory. The singers sang to one another – together – rather than for an audience. They sang as a community of singers, or perhaps better said, a communion of singers, getting their pitches from one another, listening to one another, following the shapes, and creating rich, evocative harmonies. By the end of the 19th century, shaped note singing was losing ground because, as they handout I was given said,

pianos and organs had become more abundant, and printing techniques more economical. The old song books lost favor to modern hymnals and their completely different arrangements with the melody in the top line and harmonies more easily rendered on a piano or organ.

Then came my favorite line:

“Clearly,” according to the introduction in The Social Harp, “the pleasure of the singer has been sacrificed to the ineptitude of the pianist.”

The obvious bias of the statement notwithstanding, I came away from the quote with a question: what will it take for me to unleash the enthusiasm of the shepherds in me this Advent, or the tenacity of the three kings, to go into a labor of Love in these days, rather than to allow myself to be one of those slouching toward Bethlehem, or worse, one sitting silently while others give birth to Christ this year?

Peace,
Milton

We found this sign hanging off the front porch as we drove up to the house yesterday. I wish you could see the individual notes written all over the banner.

I do feel welcomed. Thank you.

Peace,
Milton

As we got ready to leave Birmingham last Sunday, I quickly made a couple of CDs for the road while we were packing the cars, almost randomly picking tracks — mostly I picked artists I wanted to hear. Looking back on yesterday, it appears I picked a pretty good soundtrack.

This was going to be the day: we were driving to Durham, to our house (OK, our rent house), to park in our driveway, and sleep in a room that didn’t require us to check in at the desk. The day played out with a few hitches, the biggest of which was we couldn’t get into the house we were renting until this morning; we were trying to get home, but it seemed to be a moving target. We left Chattanooga late in the afternoon, determined to get to as far as we could and we made it all the way, walking into the lobby of our last hotel (for awhile) at 11:47 pm.

Our last day in Chattanooga that left us with a couple more stories to tell. After I took Ginger back across the bridge to get some tennis shoes at Fast Break, we decided to find some lunch and came upon the Between the Bridges Café, a small lunch-only place with a whimsical flair. We were the only ones in the place since it was almost closing time (they’re only open from 11 to 2:30) and we got to talk to two of the three women who are the co-owners. We learned they were all former teachers (as am I) who wanted out from under the burden of school work to do something they enjoyed and something that allowed them to set boundaries they wanted to live with. One woman described how her school administrator had caused her to decide to leave teaching.

“She was crazy,” she told us. “I think on the application it says, ‘Are you crazy?’ and if you answer, ‘Yes,’ they put you in charge.” There was more to the story. “But that crazy lady saved my life.” She went on to tell us of having a mammogram soon after she quit teaching (“I would have put it off until summer.”) and finding breast cancer, even as they were planning to open the restaurant. “I kept trusting God and coming in here. Some days all I could do was sit; other days I felt better and I did what I could.” The small café has gotten some good buzz and the women look like they are having fun chasing their dream together. Sounds like a pretty good deal all the way around.

On the way back to our cars at the hotel I invited Ginger to ride with me on the electric shuttle so she could get a taste of the experience. The driver was the one I met my first night riding and he recognized me, even remembering my hotel. About halfway through the route a short, sturdy woman got on the bus and plopped down beside me. The seat cushion let out the same exhausted wheeze as she did when she dropped into the chair. “How are you doing today?” she asked. I said I was fine and reciprocated with the question. “Oh, I feel turrible,” she said, “just turrible.”

She was dealing with the headaches and stuffiness that come with a sinus infection and was quite animated and descriptive as she told us about it, which she did with both a dramatic and humorous flair. Ginger and I both laughed along with her at one point and she slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Now how about that – I got both of you laughing and I feel turrible. That’s pretty good.”

I’m a stranger here, no one you would know
I’m from somewhere else, well, isn’t everybody though
I don’t know where I’ll be when the sun comes up
until then, sweet dreams, goodnight America

— Mary Chapin Carpenter

We left this friendly city behind knowing I-24 connects to I-75, which connects to I-40 and that would get us to Durham. We drove out about four o’clock, which let us enjoy part of Chattanooga’s traffic and a good amount of Knoxville’s as well. It also put us winding through the mountains between Knoxville and Asheville on roads we didn’t know in the dark. Tennessee and Carolina don’t simply glide into one another, they crash, leaving a wreck of winding, climbing, diving roads that left me feeling (as I drove in the dark up and down a road I did not know) like the driver in some bizarre version of Space Mountain, going up and down the mountains, all the while navigating the giant trucks, those moving canyons of steel and wheels bearing down all around us, fueled by gasoline, gravity, and capitalism. Somewhere in the middle of it all, we crossed into North Carolina, one step closer to home.

As we got out of the mountains and most of the trucks, the songs came round again and I smiled and cried as the words filled the spaces in the car not occupied by boxes and bags. About sixty miles out, Durham started showing up on the mileage signs and we both began to realize our journey was almost through.

Just before midnight, we pulled into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express where we stayed not long ago when we were traveling with the pups. A gracious and welcoming Indian woman checked us in and said with some surprise, “You’ve stayed with us before,” as though we somehow belonged. By the time we got to our room, it was Thursday – today – the day we will get to move in to our house, the day Ginger will go to her office for the first time as the pastor, the day we start living here. I queued the last song up on purpose:

The driving is done; the journey continues . . .

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — I couldn’t help but add this little early nineties video treat.