don't eat alone

As soon as work was over this evening, I raced across Durham to meet Ginger at the Armory for the Durham Symphony Holiday Concert. Downtown was full of activity: something at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC), a crowd around the downtown Christmas tree, and the usual folks finding their way to one of our many excellent eating and drinking establishments. As I passed the tree, I realized they were protestors joining those around the country trying to figure out how to respond the what has happened in Ferguson, Staten Island, and now Phoenix.

The concert was festive and charming. As we left, the conductor told the crowd that protestors had blocked the Durham Freeway and we might need to take an alternate route. “No alarm,” he said. “Just passing along information.” Since Ginger and I had not seen each other all day, we went into a restaurant and split the cheese plate so we could talk for a bit. As we were getting ready to leave, a group of about one hundred walked by chanting, “These are our streets.” We joined in and walked the three blocks past the Farmer’s Market and up Corporation Street. There were five or six cops on bikes who were pretty casual and considerate. One of the group threw a stone their direction and was quickly shouted down by those around him. Ginger even posted how proud she was of our police to Facebook as we walked.

At the intersection of Corporation and Rigsbee, the crowd turned left toward Motorco and Fullsteam and Ginger and I turned back to the right, to where our cars were parked and also where the police substation is. There were six or eight cars with their lights twirling and a line of cops blocking the street. As we got closer, we realized they were in full riot gear and carrying axe handle sized sticks. There were almost as many of them as there were protestors. About ten of us stood on the sidewalk and tried to tell them they were taking the wrong approach. There was no need for a power struggle. No need for a show of force. It was a protest, not combat. When the enemy didn’t show up, the makeshift army loaded onto a bus and went after them. Literally. They saw where the protestors were and blocked the street to create a confrontation. They arrested about forty people and then kept marching up the street even as the protestors went the other way. The only reason there was any sort of agitation was because the police made it happen.

Ginger called 911 three different times to report what was happening. The last time the operator asked if she would like to speak to an officer and one found her on the street. I walked up in the middle of their conversation. He said the protests had been going on for five hours and “you can’t let civil disobedience go on for five hours.” (Why not?) When she asked about the sticks, he said they were for pushing people back, not for hitting them. “They are better than guns,” he said.

“Those aren’t the only choices,” was my reply.

When I was teaching at Charlestown High School in Boston, one of the biggest lessons I had to learn was not to take personally the anger and rage some of my students. I was not the cause of their rage, though sometimes I became the target. When I could keep my senses and not get hooked into a power struggle, we could work things out. If I got hooked and we both got mad, the kid usually ended up getting suspended because I was the one with the power of the institution behind me. If I got hooked, it was because I let my fear get the best of me. Our police let their fear get the best of them this evening. How can a couple of hundred people marching and chanting be so intimidating and frightening to require our police to act as though they were in a war zone. There was no war. No battle. Just a protest: people walking down the street chanting and carrying signs.

We once referred to the police as peace officers: they kept the peace. Now they are law enforcement and some have even been given surplus weapons by the Pentagon. Rather than figure out how to foster a peaceful protest, they come to break it up, literally and figuratively, as though the creative expression of anger and frustration is dangerous in and of itself. The Durham Police had a chance to do something great tonight, to show America how a city can work together to work out its frustration and pain. And they blew it. Here’s hoping someone in blue will realize the error and do it differently the next time.

As we walked and the cops gathered, I thought of this old recording of Simon and Garfunkel singing “Silent Night” juxtaposed with the evening news. It seems like an appropriate carol to close.

Peace
Milton

I don’t know who said it, or where I first heard it, but for years I have remembered the First Rule of Theology: there is a God and it’s not me. I find comfort in that sentence. Being God looks like an incredibly difficult job. There’s something about the Incarnation that flips that statement over, however. God stepping into the big messy middle of human life to say, “There are humans and I’m one of them.” A change for the God who told Job to make the sun come up and then they could talk.

Emmanuel. God. With. Us.

The recent news from Ferguson and Staten Island are symptomatic of the continuing drift of our society into Us and Them on most any issue. We are us. All of us. Down to the last angry protestor, the last scared cop in riot gear, the last suicide bomber, the last self-absorbed member of Congress, the last manger in Bethlehem. Life, as Anne Lamott said this week, is forgiveness school.

In one of my training sessions at the computer store this week, a woman asked me to explain something she didn’t understand. I have explained it many times, and I have analogies and metaphors that have proven effective. I used them all up and tried to come up with a couple more and she said, “I hear what you’re saying and I know it makes sense, but I just don’t see it. I don’t get it.” What I loved about the interaction, though it was quite frustrating not being able to communicate, was it never became adversarial. We both stayed on the same side of the struggle, pulling for and with each other.

If life is forgiveness school, then we have a lot to learn. We aren’t getting it. We can only learn together. Forgive, and we shall be forgiven.

God. With. Us.

Peace,
Milton

I have been ruminating much of the day on a contrast presented to me by The Writer’s Almanac this morning. Along with the daily poem, they marked two anniversaries. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of the bus to a white passenger. In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line to American automobile manufacturing. Neither move was impulsive.

My earliest recollections of being told about Rosa Parks left me to picture her as a tired old woman who became the center of a storm, but that picture was not accurate. She was young, intelligent, and tenacious. She was the secretary of her local NAACP chapter. She stayed right where she was because it was a way to make society move on. Her resistance may have been a small act, but she had a bigger picture in mind.

Henry Ford had his own big picture in mind: making an affordable car so he could make a truckload of money. Using an assembly line sped up production and reduced both the cost and the price of the Model T. It also meant that people stood on the line doing the same thing for hours and hours, so much so that the evolution of the assembly line replaced the humans with robots. Ford hired Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, to paint an homage to the assembly line. Rivera’s images depicted the dehumanizing nature of the work, his own sense of the bigger picture. Ford was furious.

One of the big pictures painted by the Incarnation is the value of being human. God poured God’s self into human skin not as some sort of self-loathing or punishment, but because being human is good. Jesus comes in compassion and solidarity as the most human of us all, full of grace and peace and love. His big picture looked a lot more like Rosa’s than Henry’s. From the start of the story of creation, God has not put a high value on efficiency and control, leaning more towards those things which catch us by surprise, make us laugh, or pull us deeper into love with one another. You can’t build a flower or a sparrow or a two-year old on an assembly line anymore than you can build a friendship or a marriage or a neighborhood.

Though we wait for Christ to be born again in our time and in our midst, let us not wait to take small steps towards one another, waging peace in every word and deed, painting a big picture of love.

Peace
Milton

As Advent begins, I am breaking my blog silence — which was not intentional. I have been writing, but my energy has been aimed at a new book called This Must Be the Place: Reflections on Home that will come out next fall thanks to the good folks at Morehouse Press. To be able to say I am working on my next book feels great; actually finishing the manuscript is more taxing.

Though there is work left to be done, keeping my Advent Journal matters to me. I need to write. I make the journey to Bethlehem through these nightly posts. This is a promise I want to keep. So here I am.

This first Sunday in Advent was Ginger’s first official day at Pilgrim UCC seven years ago. She actually started work a couple of days earlier officiating the funeral of the parent of one of the members here. Yesterday we received word that Ginger’s cousin who had Stage IV liver cancer had died. She was forty-five. Her son, who was twenty-four and had muscular dystrophy, died two days earlier. It was not hard to find resonance as we sang today:

and you beneath life’s crushing load
whose forms are bending low
who toil along life’s climbing way
with painful steps and slow . . . .

John Berger says in Greek the word metaphor means porter: a carrier. A metaphor carries the idea, the meaning. The way darkness steals the daylight of the late afternoon in these days carries the weight of grief and struggle. We are running out of daylight even as we wait for the Light to come. Something in these days always takes me back to a scene in Fiddler on the Roof where the Jews were being run out of their village by the Russian soldiers and one of them says to the Rabbi, “Wouldn’t this be a good time for the Messiah to come?”

Meister Eckhart, a thirteenth century monk, said it another way that speaks to me even more:

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.

Jesus told Nicodemus he needed to be born again, born anew, to re-enter life in a spirit of grace and hope that had died in him. or at least had grown old. Eckhart told us Jesus needs to be born again into our present tense for God’s light to continue to break forth and we are the ones who must give birth to such Love and Light. In the Incarnation, God was not superimposed on humanity, but born right in the messy middle of it all thanks to a teenage girl who had the courage to say, “Let it be.” Now it’s our turn.

Peace,
Milton