don't eat alone

Marcia Norman: a new name to me, as of last night when an excerpt from something she had written arrived in an email from a dear friend. He didn’t offer commentary; he just knew she had something to say that I needed to hear, which was true. Now I want to pass along some of her words from a lecture at Kenyon College in 1986.

When the critics don’t like you, you fall, right there in front of everybody. But there is actually no way to do significant work of any kind without falling. Falling is, actually, the most important part of this life. If you don’t fall, then you aren’t working close enough to the edge. Then you are secretly holding on, then you’re not really flying, you just fooled everybody for a little while. . . . Falling, then, is necessary, but dangerous. People can get hurt in a fall. People can die from a fall. Well, what they die of his internal injuries, of course. . . . And we must fall. You cannot do this work if you cannot live the life. The higher you go, the further you have to fall, the stronger your nets have to be,  the better your catchers have to be. The one thing you cannot be is afraid to fall. You will fall. . . . Learning to fall is looking for things you’re not even sure you have, like wings, for example. And if you don’t find them, well, at least you looked. So you fall, so what. The only way not to fall is not to move at all. I urge all of you to fall often and land hard if you have to, or gently if you can. And then show your scars to everybody.

“The better your catchers have to be” is the phrase that caught me — and sent me looking for one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books whose title even has the word catcher in it:

“You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like—”

“It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said. “It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.”

“I know it’s a poem by Robert Burns.”

She was right, though. It is “If a body meet a body coming through the rye.” I didn’t know it then, though.

“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,'” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff–I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

Catcher or critic — a fork in the road we come to quite often. How we respond to the offering before us, whatever it might be, could determine whether the one offering flies or falls. (Did I mention I’m preaching to myself here?) I do believe we are at our best when we make an excellent offering, whatever we’re doing. Work hard. And then work some more. Dream big. Proofread. Pay attention to the details. But what both Norman and Caulfield are talking about is not so much aimed at those offering as those of us receiving who do well to remember we all need better catchers. Perhaps correcting the punctuation or grammar doesn’t need to be the first thing we do. Or the second. What if long before we felt corrected, we felt listened to, regarded. Caught.

Thanks to my friend, Terry, who pointed me to this video I can show you what being caught looks like.

Caught like that.

Peace,
Milton

Note: I should have made mention that the father who filmed his daughter singing with him made the movie in the middle of the night when his little one couldn’t sleep because she was afraid of the fireworks she heard. That’s why she keeps stopping — and he keeps catching her.

I love it when a poem catches me by surprise.

Most of the time, I do a pretty good job looking for them, but every so often (I’m happy to say) one shows up somewhere unexpectedly, ambushes me with alliteration or metaphor, and I am the better for it. Today was one of those days. Our worship today at Pilgrim was both Children and Youth Sunday and the ordination of Jake de Nap, one of our former students who is now a hospice chaplain in St. Louis. The children led the liturgy and read scripture. They were awesome: well prepared, enthusiastic, engaged. Jake had picked out the scripture readings for the day and, I found out, had also chosen a poem. This poem by Adrienne Rich. That caught me by surprise.

For Memory

Old words:  trust   fidelity
Nothing new yet to take their place.
I rake leaves, clear the lawn, October grass
painfully green beneath the gold
and in this silent labor thoughts of you
start up
I hear your voice:   disloyalty   betrayal
stinging the wires
I stuff the old leaves into sacks
and still they fall and still
I see my work undone
One shivering rainswept afternoon
and the whole job to be done over
I can’t know what you know
unless you tell me
there are gashes in our understandings
of this world
We came together in a common
fury of direction
barely mentioning difference
(what drew our finest hairs
to fire
the deep, difficult troughs
unvoiced)
I fell through a basement railing
the first day of school and cut my forehead open—
did I ever tell you? More than forty years
and I still remember smelling my own blood
like the smell of a new schoolbook
And did you ever tell me
how your mother called you in from play
and from whom? To what? These atoms filmed by ordinary dust
that common life we each and all bent out of orbit from
to which we must return simply to say
this is where I came from
this is what I knew
The past is not a husk   yet change goes on
Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

Without parsing the poem to death, I have to say there were a couple of lines that stopped me in my tracks. The first was

there are gashes in our understandings
of this world.

Not gaps. Gashes. As we endeavor to make sense of what is happening to us, much less to others around the world, there are huge tears in the fabric of our comprehension. What a powerful word picture. The second one comes at the end of the poem, in simpler language:

freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

These lines make we want to stand on my front porch and holler, “Yes!” as loudly as I can. Freedom isn’t being able to do whatever I want, it is remembering what I was called to do and doing it. The gashes in our understanding are healed by the quotidian care and compassion we offer one another.

Old words:  trust   fidelity
Nothing new yet to take their place.

Nothing indeed, thank God.

Peace,
Milton

We’ve had a grey and somehow hopeful day here in Durham. As the rain stopped, people seemed ready to wipe off benches and chairs and fill the sidewalks and patios for supper. Ginger and I met friends for coffee that turned into dinner and I came home humming, ready to add to my on going soundtrack for the season. First: Tom Waits singing “Time” —

and it’s time time time
and it’s time time time
and it’s time time time that you loved
and it’s time time time

David Rawlings wrote a song made popular by Old Crow Medicine Show that pulls me every time I hear it.

so while you sit and whistle Dixie with your money and your power
I can hear the flowers growing in the rubble of the tower
I hear leaders quit their lying, I hear babies quit their crying
I hear soldiers quit their dying, one and all
I hear them all, I hear them all, I hear them all

Mumord and Sons write songs that are informed by both the grace and gravity of life. “Roll Away Your Stone” is one of my favorites.

it seems that all my bridges have been burned,
but, you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works
it’s not the long walk home
that will change this heart,
but the welcome I receive with the restart

Patty Griffin is one who always seems to make my song list, and tonight is no exception. This is from her Downtown Church record, “Little Fire.”

my friend, you know me and my family
you’ve seen us wandering through these times
you’ve seen us in weakness and in power
you’ve seen us forgetful and unkind

all that I want is one who knows me
a kind hand on my face when I weep
and I’d give back these things I know are meaningless
for a little fire beside me when I sleep

“Before I Go” is a deep cut from John Hiatt. I have come to love this song for it’s persistent and tenacious hope:

I will try, but I will stumble
and I will fly, he told me so
proud and high or low and humble
many miles before I go
many miles before I go

Our closing song tonight is one that has had a long history in our family: Nanci Griffith’s “These Days In An Open Book.”

these days my life is an open book
missing pages I cannot seem to find
these days your face in my memory
is in a folded hand of grace against these times

And onward through these days we go . . .

Peace,
Milton

We gathered around our table for Thursday Night Dinner, which is a weekly occurrence at our house. We have a fairly regular group around the table, along with others who come occasionally, to eat and talk and laugh and be friends. For me, it is a chance to go exploring the culinary landscape to see what I can find. Tonight, the menu was:

Strawberry salad with mixed greens, cheddar cheese, and fried green beans
Roasted chicken with a orange-coffee sauce over cocoa pasta
Guinness gingerbread with passion fruit mousse

The menu came about because of a cookbook I read while I was eating breakfast. It was given to me for Christmas by my good friend, Jay. My idea for the chicken I served came from a duck recipe in the book. The gingerbread dessert went back to a night Ginger and I ate something similar at Six Plates, a local winebar. The salad happened because a local farmer has figured out how to grow great strawberries in his greenhouse (and Whole Foods sells them) and I had green beans I needed to use. So I cooked a good part of the day and we called it dinner.

I love cooking good food. I love getting to use my imagination in the kitchen. Yet what I love most of all is eating together around the table: laughing, talking, telling stories, being friends. The food is fuel for something far more significant. We are changing the world on Thursday nights. I love it.

I just need to figure out how to get a bigger table. And a bigger kitchen.

Peace,
Milton

Today was a quintessential Durham Day.

I started by dropping off cookies at Cocoa Cinnamon where I met Sarah, a member of our church, to talk about a fundraising dinner I am going to cater this summer for her nonprofit organization. Then I went to lunch with Leon, who owns Cocoa Cinnamon along with his wife Areli. We ate at Ninth Street Bakery (an amazing bowl of Thai Curry) and fed our friendship with a discussion of dreams and hopes and faith. I rested a bit this afternoon and then went down to Fullsteam Brewery for our church Lenten Study (an adult confirmation class of sorts) and continued my Lenten ritual of an awesome grilled cheese from Paul and the crew on the American Meltdown truck (tonight’s was a “Dirty South” — pimento cheese and andouille sausage) and a Fearington Winter Ale from Jordan and Zack at the bar. Eight Pilgrims (that’s what we call ourselves) — Ginger, Mandy, Brad, Cat, Katie, Bev, Laura, and I — sat around one of the tables in the big room talking theology as the Middle Eastern band warmed up in preparation for the monthly belly dancing demonstration. I managed to finish our session just as the dancers began.

It was quite a segue. The room filled up with people who had come to support and encourage those who were dancing. Each group appeared to be a class — from different places, I imagine — who had worked hard on their routines. Some were more advanced than others, some had fancier props or makeup, and all of them danced with abandon. The crowd was energetic in their enthusiasm, the whole scene a beautiful picture of community.

In the hour before the dancing began, we talked Theology: capital T, stained glass words and all, and in that discussion we came to the Trinity. We talked a bit about different metaphors people had offered over the centuries, such as St. Patrick’s clover, to explain the way Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit manage to be the three-in-one God, and we talked about how metaphors both help and often break down. I went on to say what I find most meaningful in the Trinity is the image of God in community with God’s self: the image of the triune God is an example of the kind of community we are called to be. We had to keep talking louder and louder because the Middle Eastern instruments were competing with our voices, one room holding us all.

The image of the Godhead weaving in and out of one another, negotiating their collective existence, interacting without resonance rather than relegation, hope rather than hierarchy, mutuality rather than manipulation, a living picture of Life Together. In her sermon on Sunday, Ginger reminded us we are called to choose relationships over rules, norms, and doctrine. We are called to choose each other, to say, “This is my beloved . . .” every chance we get, to be our own incarnation of the togetherness we see in the Trinity. Faith and life, as I have said on more than one occasion, are team sports, not individual events. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God. None of those happens alone.

While I was waiting for my sandwich before the group from church arrived, Paul, who owns American Meltdown with his wife, Alysha, and I were talking about the sense of camaraderie among the food truck folks in town. Much of that has to do with what Nick and Rochelle have done at The Cookery, which is the commissary kitchen where many of the trucks do their prep work. The common kitchen helped to create a sense of community among them; they pull for each other, help each other out, and even collaborate for special events. We agreed that one day someone will look back and want to tell the story of what if felt like to live in Durham during these days. We live in an encouraging and exciting place. Togetherness was happening all around us. We ate together. We drank together. We talked and laughed and prayed together. And some of us even danced. A couple of weeks ago, as we were beginning our Lenten study, I pointed out that faith is a verb in Greek and a noun in English. For most of the history of biblical translation, we have used the word believe, but I think it falls short because it turns it into intellectual assent. Trust is a better translation because faith carries with it some idea of risk, of relationship, of vulnerability. Trusting God is different than believing. Through the sweeps and turns of my Durham Day, trust was the common currency. We are in this together and trusting one another to see what we can do next as we weave in and out of each other’s lives.

We didn’t need clovers to get a picture of the Trinity tonight.

Peace,
Milton

My offering today consists of parts of our worship service at Pilgrim: the call to worship, the prayer of confession, and our benediction. I was moved by the words and wanted to pass them along.

Call to Worship

Lent is the journey into the acceptance of mystery, a time of self discovery designed to lead us to face the division within us: between what God calls us to be and what, in fact, we are. During these days we grow towards integrating these two truths.
It is a journey about homecoming: coming home to selfhood; and coming home once again to the call to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
It is a journey inside through spiritual exercises. They stretch us, they tone us up. God invites our total involvement through an interplay of all that we are: through our bodies, heads, hearts, wills; through the coming together of all our scatteredness and fragmentation.
It is a journey done in stages: stages of time, stages of experience, stagers allowing ourselves to be open to God’s grace, which brings us to new attitudes and to new hearts.
It is a journey about growing in mystery. To walk in mystery, we have to look for hidden depths. As we continue to question more deeply, mystery grows stronger. We come in touch with “a light that shines in the dark, a light the darkness cannot overpower.”
In this journey of self discovery, as we come to be in touch with our deepest longings and open ourselves to God, to others, and to the world, two longings meet: ours and God’s.

Prayer of Confession

I confess my sin because I believe sin is real. I believe sin is the real brokenness of relationship with others, with the earth, with myself, and with God.
I confess my sins because I participate in systems that break people. I participate in systems that break our environment. I participate in systems that break our relationship with God. And I believe sin is more than passive participation in systems.
I confess my sins because, consciously and unconsciously, I cause brokenness. Sometimes, I sin because the choice I make is the lesser of two evils. Sometimes I sin because I’m just selfish, jealous, lazy, proud, impatient, scared, or just too tired to care. I confess my sins because that act of confession — that act of prayer — calls me to accountability and reminds me I am not just a sinner. I am also a reconciler, a peacemaker, a healer.
I have a responsibility to try and heal what I have broken, which is often hard to do and that’s why I also confess my sings to remind me I cannot do it on my own. I need help. I need grace, community; I need God.
I confess my sins to be homes before God about who I am. I confess my sins, not to make myself feel guilty, not to put on sackcloth and cover myself in ashes. I confess my sins so I can learn to love myself in all my wholeness, so I can learn to love others in all their wholeness as God loves us.

Benediction
(written by Michael Josephson) — Ginger used this recently at the funeral of a lifelong friend.

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end.
There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours, or days.
All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else.
Your wealth, fame, and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.
It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.
Your grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will finally disappear.
So, too, your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will expire.
The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.
It won’t matter where you came from or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end.
It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant.
Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.
So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?
What will matter is not what you bought but what you built; not what you got but what you gave.
What will matter is not your success but your significance.
What will matter is not what you learned but what you taught.
What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage,
or sacrifice that enriched, empowered, or encouraged others to emulate your example.
What will matter is not your competence but your character.
What will matter is not how many people you knew but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone.
What will matter is not your memories but the memories that live in those who loved you.
What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom, and for what.
Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident.
It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice.
Choose to live a life that matters.

I hope you find something in these words that speaks to you.

Peace,
Milton

We took a long walk this morning through downtown Durham working to prepare for our walk of part of the Camino de Santiago coming up this summer. While we walked, a bunch of folks ran a 25K to commemorate twenty-five years of Merge Records. We were walking to end up at the end of the race where the food trucks were. I stepped off the sidewalk to go around a couple walking in front of us, hit an uneven piece of pavement and rolled my ankle; nothing dramatic. I took one step and felt it go — and it’s ankle which has been sprained before. Tonight, my picture will have to be my thousand words; I’m wrapped up and ready to sleep.

Peace,
Milton