don't eat alone

Tonight marked the Second Annual Pi(e) Night here at our house. Last year 3.14 fell on a Thursday, so the inaugural event (please remember there is no such thing as a “first annual”) fell on our regular dinner night and we had a blast. Eleven of us gathered this evening — some veterans, some rookies — and we ate and laughed an talked our way through seven different kinds of pie, since each course had to be a pie of some sort. The menu was:

• BLT Tart (bacon, smoked mozzarella, tomato tart; greens tossed with ranch dressing along side)
• Pork Chile Relleno Pie (ground pork, corn, roasted poblanos, cheddar cheese, with avocado puree)
• Caribbean Shepherd’s Pie (Caribbean pot roast, roasted plantains, grilled pineapple, topped with mashed purple sweet potatoes)
• Fig Marmalade and Marscapone Pop Tarts
• Chocolate Pecan Tartlets
• Goat Cheese Tartlets with Blackberries and Basil

I had the best day making pies and an amazing evening sharing them. Now the day is done and I spent most of my words around the dinner table rather than writing here. This has been the kind of night that reminds me how much it matters that we come to the table to share our lives, pass the pie, and remember we belong together, to each other.

Oh — I will post recipes.

Peace
Milton

This has been one of those days when I have had music running through my head. It has also been a day of doing — of carrying out quotidian tasks — rather than reading or contemplating. So I offer songs tonight — a Lenten soundtrack of sorts — drawn from songs that have spoken to me or spoken for me over the last several months. In the spirit of the Psalms, these are songs than name feelings more than anything else, to acknowledge what is difficult and painful alongside of all that gives us hope.

First, a song of lament. Patty Griffin’s “Wild Old Dog,” which begins:

God is a wild old dog
someone left out on the highway . . .

What I hear in the song is the ache of grief. (She wrote the album after the death of her father.)

it’s lonely on the highway
sometimes a heart can turn to dust
get whittled down to nothing
broken down and crushed
in with the bones of
wild old dogs
wild old dogs

The honesty of our lament opens our hearts to the possibility of comfort and even healing. I love this song.

I suppose there are several Indigo Girls’ songs that would make my all-time playlist, but one to which I keep returning in these days is “All That We Let In.”

I pass the cemetery, walk my dog down there
I read the names in stone and say a silent prayer
when I get home, you’re cooking supper on the stove
and the greatest gift of life is to know love

Mavis Staples has so many songs of faith and feeling that we could rewrite the Psalms using just her stuff. Here she is singing Jeff Tweedy’s song, “You’re Not Alone.” (He’s the one playing guitar.) I find deep encouragement here.

a broken dream
a broken heart
isolated and afraid
open up this is a raid
I wanna get it through to you
you’re not alone

John David Souther has written his fair share of the songs that make up the soundtrack of my life. This one, however, I didn’t know until just a couple of years ago: “Little Victories”

little victories
I know you need one
little victories
of the heart

they say that these are not the best of times

but they’re the only times I’ve ever known
and I believe there is a time for meditation

in cathedrals of our own

I’ll let Billy Joel’s “Summer Highland Falls” finish today’s playlist. The words in the first verse I found meaningful at several different stages of my life. I love that this video is a fresh recording. Both he and the song have aged fairly well.

The path through Lent is one of focus and faith, of trust and temerity, of wonder and weariness. It’s good to have songs to sing as we go.

Peace,
Milton

I love it when I get caught by surprise.

I got up this morning a little early so I could read a little more Niebuhr and perhaps plant a seed tha

t would grow into my blog post for tonight. I came away well fed by a sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known. And now abide faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

I marked up the margins with notes to go along with his challenging words about the pace of change we face andhow we keep some sense of ourselves and our connectedness, both globally and close up, and how we are to embrace the uncertainty of life in order for our faith to be substantial.

Trust in God also means trust in life itself, despite the obvious patches of meaninglessness which sometimes drive us to the edge of despair. If we do not admit that these patches of meaninglessness are there, then our faith becomes sentimental. (32-33)

Where was I? Oh, yes — getting caught by surprise.

I finished reading, finished my breakfast, and headed for work. Our mornings at the computer store often begin with a word of challenge or encouragement; this morning, I arrived to find everyone gathered around a computer monitor to watch a TED Talk by a guy named Drew Dudley. The talk was almost over when I got there, and I arrived in time to hear him say,

There is no world only 6 billion understandings of it. And if you change one person’s understanding of it, you’ve changed the whole thing.

I’d been sitting and scribbling at the computer for about an hour tonight when I remembered I had written down that quote, and so I found his talk and watched the whole thing. He calls for a new definition of leadership that teeters on the same precipice of sentimentality and is also wonderfully challenging. Here’s the talk:

After listening to Dudley, my mind and heart are filled with lollipop moments, with the faces of people I need to call or write and say thank you because those encounters are the ones that encouraged me to trust God and trust life; to stare down the meaninglessness, or even embrace it; to trust the Love will not let us go.

I’m carrying these words with me:

We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments, how many of them we create, how many of them we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward, and how many of them we say thank you for. Because we’ve made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world. There’s only six billion understandings of it, and if you change one person’s understanding of it, one person’s understanding of what they’re capable of, one person’s understanding of how much people care about them, one person’s understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you’ve changed the whole thing.

. . . and the greatest of these is love.

Peace
Milton

We’ve had two absolutely glorious days in a row here in Durham. The mornings have had a bit of a chill, but not a serious one. Instead, they have quickly given way to the kind warmth of an early spring day — one that knows you need to feel the sun but are not yet ready for the weight of summer. The sky was the kind of blue that makes you believe hope is a color, running from one horizon to another with hardly a wisp of cloud to contest its resonance. It must have been a day like today when the Psalmist wrote, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” More than glad, I have felt joyful as though each breath wanted to stretch my lungs and increase my capacity to take in all that was being offered.

On the way to work this morning, I was reminded by the good folks at NPR that today marks the third anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that was so devastating to the people of Japan. I don’t imagine there were many that day who have found much comfort singing

all nature sings and ‘round me rings
the music of the spheres . . .

Though I am grateful for our gorgeous day, I’m also aware that holding the creative tension between perfect day and powerful destruction calls for theological reflection in much the same way that reading Niebuhr did for me the other night because to look for God in one is to be challenged to find God in the other. And God is in both, not as instigator but as presence, as Love.

The NPR story talked about some of the security measures being taken in light of the devastating storm. At least two cities were building giant sea walls — over seventeen feet high — along the coastline to stop the possibility of a repeat performance, which means beaches will be blocked, along with the chance for the people to just see the ocean on the beautiful days. Looking at photographs like the one above makes me wonder if the sea wall would make any actual difference. For now, the government seems determined to do something that shows they did something.

Robert Frost wrote in “Mending Wall”

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

He was talking about a neighbor who came out each spring to rebuild the wall between them that winter had dismantled. Frost wondered aloud why the man thought a wall was an answer to anything. The best stories from Japan, or anywhere else acquainted with grief, are those of people taking care of one another. Those are the bonds that will hold against the storm long after the concrete has collapsed.

I suppose it is easy for me to talk in tsunamic metaphor since I spent my day in the sun and the sun doesn’t shine here everyday. A two-story wall may keep away the water, but won’t it also keep away the stories of walks on the beach, or what washed up on the shore, of sunshiny days?

I don’t want to miss the sunshine.

Peace
Milton

Because I work at the computer store, I have an inordinate number of apps on my iPhone because most every time one of my coworkers tells me of a new app they have discovered, I end up downloading it. One of those is called “IFTTT” (If This, Then That) which allows you set up sequences (recipes, they call them) so you can always have things happen a certain way — if you take a post a picture on Instagram, then it will also put a copy in your Dropbox folder — like a giant game of Mouse Trap. I put the app on my phone last summer and then removed it earlier this year when I realized I don’t use it. As I read Reinhold Niebuhr this morning, I realized I part of it may be I don’t think about life rolling out that way, for the most part.

The books that have found me this Lenten season — both gifts from friends — have been around awhile: first Thurman, and now Justice and Mercy by Reinhold Niebuhr, which was edited after he died by his daughter and published in 1974, though the material comes from the Forties and Fifties. Niebuhr is the one who said, “Justice is what Love looks like in public;” he was also one who worked hard to find a faith that mattered, that was relevant to a nuclear world, to a world that had known the tragedy of two world wars. The pages are filled with his prayers and sermons.

The opening sermon is “The Providence of God” and he makes a distinction between “the instinct of religion” and “the gospel of Christ,” even as he says we find both in scripture. Without offering a quote fest, let me see if I can explain what has captured me in what he said.

“The natural instincts of religion demand that my life be given meaning by a special security against of the insecurities of life,” he says, quoting from a couple of Psalms to show it is natural for us to expect punishment for evil and reward for good. If it should seem those “were not being properly correlated in life; then God will guarantee finally that they will be properly correlated.” He goes on with examples from scripture and history of those who expect God to be on their side (cue Bob Dylan), that believe that judgment will set things right in their favor. “These are natural religious instincts,” he says, “the natural efforts to close prematurely the great structure of life’s meaning.”

Life is not IFTTT. There is more to faith than security and favor. We diminish what it means to follow Christ when we distill the structure of meaning to those two pillars.

For life is not completely at variance with itself. There is reward for goodness in life, and there is punishment for evil, but not absolutely. The same law which punishes the criminal punishes the Savior. And there are three crosses: two for criminals who cannot meet the moral mediocrities of life, and one for the Savior who rises above it. This is life. (18)

I read the sermon before I went to church today where we looked at the temptatio

ns of Jesus. As I thought through the sequence of the Tempter’s offerings — turn the stones to bread, jump and the angels will catch you, play the game and all this can be yours — I saw them as a picture of the very tension Neibuhr describes: Satan offers security, power, favor; Jesus chooses love, grace, mercy. Jesus understood what he had come to do was beyond making sure he felt safe in the Rock of Ages or knew that God was on his side. So he

said, “No.” Over and over. And then came out of the desert to deliver the sermon that was Niebuhr’s inspiration:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

A little more from Reinhold:

It is not true that God gives special favors, and it is not true that there are simple moral meanings in the processes of history. We cannot speak simply of a moral order which, if defied, would destroy us. . . . The Christian faith believes that within and beyond the tragedies and the contradictions of history we have laid hold upon [God’s] loving heart, the proof of whose love is first impartiality towards all of his children, and secondly a mercy which transcends good and evil. (20)

Christ calls us to expect more out of God than security, attention, or even fairness, because though all three requests have their validity at certain times, we live in a world that is not safe, that is inattentive to most of the suffering of humanity, and is certainly not fair. If those three things are all we expect of God, our religion will fail. But that is not the last word.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore we must be saved by love.

And nothing can separate us from Love.

Peace,
Milton

Because my Lenten practice is to write everyday, I have found that means I must also read. I need to find fellow travelers — generally those who have walked the road ahead of me leaving something of a path to follow. What cooking and theology share in common is there’s not much that is new; we are at our best when we are retelling the old, old story in our own way. The paradox is the new light that breaks forth even as we tell the well-worn stories of our faith.

The book I started reading — or should I say re-reading — is not an old book in the scope of Christian history, but is one of the early books of the modern Civil Rights movement, and one Martin Luther King, Jr. is said to have carried with him most everywhere he went: Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. It was originally published in 1949. My edition, printed in 1996, has a foreword written by Vincent Harding, who has been instrumental in connecting faith and human rights in this country for many, many years and is a truly hopeful and gentle soul.

I began feasting on the book during my lunch hour at the computer store. Hardly a page into his piece, Harding says that Thurman’s book could best be described “as a profound quest for a liberating spirituality, a way of exploring and experiencing those crucial life points where personal and societal transformations are creatively joined.” In the margin beside the paragraph I wrote, “Lent,” because the thought connected me back to what Chuck Campbell said yesterday about the season being “more social, political, structural, and systemic” than giving up something as a statement of personal piety.

For many years now, I have felt the final word in most any theological discussion, or most any worship service for that matter, should be, “So what?” Whether we are talking about the veracity of the miracles or the Sermon on the Mount or whether we should paint the Fellowship Hall blue or green, we do well to ask, “So what?” How will what we are talking about now make a difference later? Or, as Harding put it, what will be our personal and societal transformation? So what?

After lunch today, I talked with a woman who is working on a project to teach high school students about World War One by studying graveyards. She has traveled to three of the main graveyards in Europe and had picture after picture of tombstones and monuments. She had stories to go with the stones. I remembered from my study with Facing History and Ourselves the brutal statistics recording the thousands upon thousands who were killed by machine guns — new technology in that war. In one battle, nearly 20,000 fell in a little over fifteen minutes. And it was to be the War That Would End All Wars. The next thing we knew, the world was engaged in the sequel: The Good War. The two centuries my life will span will be marked as those beholden to what Walter Wink calls “the myth of redemptive violence.” So what?

Even as I refrain from writing more about my own views about faith and violence, I realize anything I say is written from a position of privilege and power. I don’t mean I have access to the rooms and meetings where decisions are made. In fact, when it comes to influencing anyone on a governmental level, I feel quite helpless because I don’t have enough money to get anyone’s attention. Nevertheless, when I think about the title of Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited, I realize I don’t think of myself as one of the disinherited or marginalized. I realized that even more as I began reading because he was writing, not to me, but to those for whom the book was named — those who live with their backs against the wall — and concluding, even as he began,

To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity has been sterile and of little avail. (11)

How do we connect the personal transformation we seek in this season with the corporate transformation we so desperately need? When I look at how I am living out these days, what is my answer when I ask, “So what?”

I wish it were an easier answer than I have been able to find. But Harding and Thurman are good voices in my ear. Harding finished his preface by pointing out that what Thurman wrote in 1949 focused primarily on the needs of African-Americans as representatives of the disinherited in this country has a wider application a half century later.

Latinos, Native Americans, Southeast Asians, and many women and gay and lesbian people are only the most obvious additions to Thurman’s community of the wall. For the pressures of the post industrialist capitalist world order have pushed many other people against a great variety of unfamiliar and unexpected walls (and glass ceilings), and we are all hounded by the inner demons of fear, hypocrisy, and hatred. . . . Shall we gather at the wall?

This week, I found out one of the folks I used to cook with here in Durham was taken in by INS for questioning. Turns out it was a case of mistaken identity. He was not the one they were looking for, but, as long as they already had him in custody they decided to check his papers. He has been in this country almost ten years, has been gainfully employed all of that time, and he is undocumented. So they are preparing to deport him without much of a conversation with anyone, including his employer who is will ing to stand up for him. I’m committed to writing everyday as my spiritual practice during Lent. So what?

Peace,
Milton

My friend David Gentiles knew how to make gumbo. His mama taught him how to do it and he used her recipe. I never had a chance to let him teach me how to do it before he died, but on more than one occasion I would call him from Boston and say, “I tried to make the roux, but I burned it.” And he would laugh, not to make fun of me, but a laugh that came out of the deep joy of his existence, out of the heart of our friendship, a laugh that let me know my failure was by no means the last word.

Even with his comforting chuckles, I haven’t attempted a gumbo in years. Until last night. I make lunch for the local UCC clergy gathering the first Thursday of every month and the proximity to Mardi Gras put me in a gumbo state of mind, along with reading Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio, which has helped me to rethink how I look at certain things when it comes to cooking. So I pulled a couple of cookbooks off the shelf, both of which had been given to me by Cherry, another Cajun friend, and figured out what I wanted to do and then I prepared to make the roux. According to the cloud of witnesses gathered round, what I needed was

1 cup of flour
1 cup of vegetable oil
1 cast iron skillet or dutch oven
time

I put the skillet on the stove and set it on medium heat. I measured the flour and poured it in a bowl, added the oil and whisked them into a slurry.Then I poured the mixture into the skillet and began to stir. As it cooked, I worked on other things. I diced celery, onions, and peppers; I sliced the chicken and the andouille; I gathered spices; and, about every three or four minutes, I stirred the roux. The oil began to cook into the flour so the two were not so easily separated. And then the color began to change from light beige to a deeper tan, finally ending up almost looking like molten chocolate — without being burned, which is what the recipe said a good roux would do. And it took forty-five minutes.

What the roux needed most was time.

Perhaps I should say, what the roux needed most was for me to take time: to watch, to listen, to stir rather than rush to see how fast I could get on to the next step, to get past the preparation and get the soup going. Beyond even the flour and oil, the most essential element to the whole thing was time. Perhaps I will learn it won’t always take forty-five minutes, but there ain’t no shortcut. It takes time.

As we ate the gumbo for lunch today, we listened to Chuck Campbell, preaching professor at Duke, who had come to talk to us about preaching through the upcoming season. He was enthusiastic and engaged, and I could tell he had taken time to let the texts simmer in both head and heart. I came away with several things on which to ponder, but what I want to mention here is his sense that we have lost the communal nature of Lent, the corporate sense of what the season means. We each have our list of what we are giving up, but there is more to these forty days than saying no to chocolate or caffeine. Lent, he said, is “more social, political, structural, and systemic”: our faith is about challenging the “principalities and powers,” about interrupting institutional injustice with Love. Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” In the hungering dark of these days, we are to remember, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It bends towards love.

And it takes time. Not the kind of it-will-happen-someday time, where we go on about our lives and leave the work to someone else, but pay-attention-so-the-roux-doesn’t-burn kind of time, where we keep stirring things up, where we keep the heat on, where we call injustice by name, where we love without fear.

Last Sunday I preached at our church. The passage was the Transfiguration. I was captured by Jesus’ words to Peter, James, and John after they fell to the ground in fear when they heard God’s voice from the clouds: “Do not be afraid. Get up.” David Lose points out the Greek here is the same as the angel’s words to the women when they come to the Tomb after Jesus’ resurrection: “Do not be afraid. He is risen.” Jesus was saying the same thing: be raised up. Be alive, not afraid.

Fear is the common currency of American culture. Almost every voice that speaks from amongst the institutions that populate our existence, the call is to be afraid, to be very afraid. Our Lenten journey offers us the chance to take the time to remember they are lying to us. Fear is not the bedrock of our existence. Fear is not what motivates us. Fear is not what is most natural. Much like Jesus stared down the temptations in his forty days, we have time, if we will take it, to let the Spirit stir in our hearts and remember the heart of humanity is not found in an institution, nor even in an individual: life, love, faith are all team sports. We are in this together not to build fortresses or monuments, but to, well, be together.

And while we’re together, we might as well eat. I’ll make gumbo.

Peace
Milton